Truthful Allocation of Virtual Machine Instances with the Notion of Combinatorial Auction

An auction mechanism is said to be truthful if every bidder can maximize her profit by declaring the true valuation of requested items. In this paper, we propose a truthful combinatorial auction-based scheme to allocate virtual machine (VM) instances of various types to the users in clouds so that the total amount of valuations attained by the allocation is maximized. The proposed scheme is an extension of the approximation scheme proposed by Lehmann et al. so that: 1) each user can designate the time period during which requested bundle of items is occupied, and 2) it takes into account the type of instances which was assumed to be identical in the original scheme. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by simulation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme certainly outperforms conventional schemes with respect to the resource utilization, revenue generation, and the allocation efficiency.