Resource Allocation in Market-based Grids Using a History-based Pricing Mechanism

In an ad-hoc Grid environment where producers and consumers compete for providing and employing resources, trade handling in a fair and stable way is a challenging task. Dynamic changes in the availability of resources over time makes the treatment yet more complicated. Here we employ a continuous double auction protocol as an economic-based approach to allocate idle processing resources among the demanding nodes. Consumers and producers determine their bid and ask prices using a sophisticated history-based dynamic pricing strategy and the auctioneer follows a discriminatory pricing policy which sets the transaction price individually for each matched buyer-seller pair. The pricing strategy presented generally simulates human intelligence in order to define a logical price by local analysis of the previous trade cases. This strategy is adopted to meet the user requirements and constraints set by consumers/producers. Experimental results show waiting time optimization which is particularly critical when resources are scarce.