Dynamic Programming based Allocation of Virtual Machine Instances in Clouds

Abstract

Auction-based mechanism for dynamic virtual machine provisioning and allocation (VMPA) can help cloud providers configure the resources efficiently based on the user demand and yield high revenue. The existing auction-based mechanisms mostly use greedy method to allocate the VM resources, which give priority to the users with high bid density. However, this kind of local optimal selection does not always bring the overall optimal solution. We propose dynamic programming based mechanism for solving VMPA problem (DP-VMPA), which takes the maximum social welfare as the objective function, and uses the combinatorial auction-based dynamic programming (CA-DP) allocation algorithm to solve the Winner Determination Problem (WDP). Finally, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is used to decide the payment of each user. We perform simulation experiments to compare our proposed mechanism with CA-PROVISION mechanism and show that the DP-VMPA mechanism can allocate VM resources more effectively, and bring higher profits to the auctioneer.