Resource Pricing and Demand Allocation for Revenue Maximization in IaaS Clouds: A Market-Oriented Approach

With more users outsourcing their applications to the cloud, resource pricing becomes an important issue for IaaS cloud management. Jointly considering her own bidding budget and the price of cloud resources, each user is self-motivated to purchase cloud resources according to her resource demand which maximizes her own utility. Meanwhile, the cloud service provider (CSP) regulates the price of cloud resources with a certain profitability objective achieved. With an elaborate resource pricing strategy, the goals from users and the CSP are balanced and respectively satisfied to some extent. This article provides an insight into the market-oriented cloud pricing strategy. In specific, we propose an auction market in the IaaS cloud, where multiple users with heterogeneous bidding budgets and QoS requirements subscribe cloud resources according to their resource demands. The resource pricing and demand allocation scheme targeting revenue maximization also satisfies essential properties including budget feasibility, incentive compatibility and envy-freeness. To attack the NP-hardness and non-convexity of revenue maximization problem, we design a price-incentive resource auction mechanism namely RARM, which preserves an (1+alpha) approximation ratio on revenue maximization. Finally, we evaluate our RARM mechanism based on the real-world dataset to certify the efficacy of our proposed approach.