Pricing the cloud based on multi-attribute auction mechanism

Cloud computing is a dynamic paradigm which aims to provide on-demand computing resources to a user over the Internet. Most of the existing cloud providers use fixed pricing strategy. However, a few cloud service providers have recently priced their services using auction-style pricing. While cloud consumers take care of Quality of Service (QoS), their preferences for QoS differ from those of cloud providers. Consumers that use the cloud, for example, typically expect high availability, therefore, they need to bring availability, reliability, and scalability together to achieve true high availability. In contrast, high availability entails more expenditures in hardware and/or software resources, resulting in higher expenses for cloud providers. In this paper, we propose a novel auction strategy to include QoS parameters bundle into the price, allocating available cloud services between users, and establishing an auction strategy to enable revenue approximation. In order to accomplish this, we formulate the problem of allocating a cloud service coupled with bundle of QoS parameters to the winners as a multi-attribute auction problem. To address this problem, we present a novel multi-attribute auction pricing model with numerous consumers and a single cloud provider. We also introduce the new QoS Parameter Bundle Pricing Scheme that establishes the relation between a cloud service’s bundle of QoS parameters and the estimated price of cloud resources, which can produce more revenue than a fixed pricing strategy. Last, we put forward three algorithms MAAPM (i.e., to solve a multi-attribute auction problem), FMAA (i.e., represents existing state-of-the-art auction mechanisms in the literature) and Fixed-Payment (i.e., represents the currently used fixed payment strategy). Extensive simulations have revealed that MAAPM outperforms FMAA and Fixed Payment in all the metrics except the execution time, also MAAPM results at growing revenues for cloud providers and decreasing expenditure for users.