New Mechanism for Reservation in Cloud Computing

Changjun Wang, Weidong Ma, Tao Qin, Feidiao Yang, Tie-Yan Liu, Xujin Chen, Xiao-Dong Hu

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of designing new mechanism for selling reserved instances in cloud computing. Our goal is to maximize the social welfare. We propose a prompt mechanism in the sense that the acceptance and the payment for a job is determined at the very moment of its arrival. We show that the mechanisms has a competitive ratio of O(ln (kT)) under some mild assumption, where k (res. T) is the maximum ratio between per-instance-hour valuation (res. length) of any two jobs.We then prove that no algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio better than ln (2kT) under the same assumption. Therefore, our mechanism is optimal within a constant factor.