Mechanism Design for Stochastic Virtual Resource Allocation in Non-cooperative Cloud Systems

Currently, virtualization technology has been widely adopted by cloud service providers to provide flexible and cost-effective resource sharing among users. On cloud platforms, computing resources are allocated on-demand dynamically and the application hosted on a virtual machine(VM) usually has the illusion of complete control of resources. Thus, a selfish VM may strategically compete for resource with other VMs to maximize its own benefit while at the cost of overall system performance. This problem poses new challenges to cloud providers, who must thwart non-cooperative behavior as well as allocating resource among selfish VMs efficiently. In this paper, we propose to utilize mechanism design to allocate resource among selfish VMs in a non-cooperative cloud environment. Because the accurate relationship between VM's valuation function and allocated resource may not be available in practice and the valuation function parameters may not noise free, we also propose to apply stochastic approximation methods to get stochastic solution for allocation and payment outcomes. We show through theoretical analysis and simulations that the proposed stochastic mechanism is efficient and incentive compatible. That is, the incorporation of mechanism design for virtualized resource allocation is able to enforce cooperation and achieve efficient resource utilization among selfish VMs in non-cooperative cloud systems.