Continuous double auction for cloud market: Pricing and bidding analysis

Cloud computing has recently attracted a substantial amount of attention from both industry and academia. Its growing demand gives normal users an opportunity to sell their local resources to the cloud market, which introduces new challenges for the existing coarse-grained pricing models. In this paper, we examine the potential of applying continuous double auction framework to handle these heterogeneous cloud resources. First, we establish an e-auction platform, on which cloud service providers and users can trade computing and storage resources online. Then we formulate a continuous double auction model for cloud market and further develop a novel belief-based hybrid bidding strategy (BH-strategy) for cloud players to ensure their profit maximization. At last, we conduct three simulation scenarios to compare the performance between BH-strategy and other dominating bidding strategies, and plenty of simulation results show that our BH-strategy outperforms others in all the scenarios on user surpluses by 20% or above. Besides, the BH-strategy can obtain a 16% higher efficiency in 1/3 the amount of time of other strategies.