Strategy-Proof Dynamic Resource Pricing of Multiple Resource Types on Federated Clouds

There is growing interest in large-scale resource sharing with emerging architectures such as cloud computing, where globally distributed and commoditized resources can be shared and traded. Federated clouds, a topic of recent interest, aims to integrate different types of cloud resources from different providers, to increase scalability and reliability. In federated clouds, users are rational and maximize their own interest when consuming and contributing shared resources, while globally distributed resource supply and demand changes as users join and leave the cloud dynamically over time. In this paper, we propose a dynamic pricing scheme for multiple types of shared resources in federated clouds and evaluate its performance. Fixed pricing, currently used by cloud providers, does not reflect the dynamic resource price due to the changes in supply and demand. Using simulations, we compare the economic and computational efficiencies of our proposed dynamic pricing scheme with fixed pricing. We show that the user utility is increased, while the percentage of successful buyer requests and the percentage of allocated seller resources is higher with dynamic pricing.