Towards truthful resource reservation in cloud computing

Prudent capacity planning to meet their clients future computational needs is one of the major issues cloud computing providers face today. By offering resource reservations in advance, providers gain insight into the projected demand of their customers and can act accordingly. However, customers need to be given an incentive, e.g. discounts granted, to commit early to a provider and to honestly, i.e. truthfully, reserve their predicted future resource requirements. Customers may reserve capacity deviating from their truly predicted demand, in order to exploit the mechanism for their own benefit, thereby causing futile costs for the provider. In this paper we prove, using a game theoretic approach, that i) truthful reservation is the best, i.e. dominant, strategy for customers if they are capable to make precise forecasts of their demands and that ii) deviations from truthtelling can be profitable for customers if their demand forecasts are uncertain.