Optimal Overbooking Policy for Cloud Service Providers: Profit and Service Quality

Abstract

A cloud federation is a current paradigm that enables partnered cloud providers to share idle capacities during low demand periods and to purchase spare resources during demand spikes. In this research, we propose an optimal overbooking policy to maximize federation members' profits and enhance cloud users' experiences. The proposed policy overcomes cloud providers' low utilization and increases their profits. Under the market-oriented cloud federation system, we use the number of idle resources in the cloud federation and the operational costs of those resources to help the provider decide on its instance exchange price. Under such a price mechanism, we develop an optimal overbooking model and identify the conditions necessary for optimal solutions. Through implementing the optimal mechanism, we observe that the proposed overbooking policy can improve a federated provider's profits and decrease the probability of service level agreement (SLA) violation. When a provider's capacity is relatively large and the provider adopts the proposed overbooking policy, it could achieve maximum profits and decline its SLA violation when it has unmet customer demands and there are idle resources in the cloud federation. Through establishing the cooperative game model of the cloud federation, we make a reasonable profit distribution based on Shapley value. The cloud provider's profits and the probability of the SLA violation change as the instance price, the distribution of unserved customers, the number of federation members and penalty cost change. Compared with the other overbooking policies and no overbooking mechanisms, our research improves profits and reduces cloud provider's overbooking risks, thereby presenting a win-win situation for both the individual providers and the cloud federation. INDEX TERMS Cloud federation, overbooking policies, optimization profit distribution, revenue management.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: SLA-aware load balancing using risk management framework in cloud

“…Thus prevents cloud data center (Hussain anf Sohaib 2019) SLA violation. Yao et al (2019) and Yadav et al (2018) established an effective overbooking model and also accepted the requirements needed for better solutions. Through following the optimum approach, they found that the suggested overbooking technique would raise a federated company's income and reduce the risk of SLA contravention.…”

A Flexible Billing Life Cycle for Cloud Services Using Augmented Customer Agreements

“…A similar problem is tackled by Roy et al [17] by proposing PRIME, a pricing scheme supporting an optimised and unbiased distribution of profit among different actors in mobile sensor-cloud architectures. Yao et al [3] provide an optimal overbooking policy to maximize providers' profits and enhance cloud users' experiences by decreasing the number of SLA violations. They achieve these goals by establishing a cooperative game model of providers organised in a cloud federation with sharing resources, and making a reasonable profit distribution.…”

“…However, only some of the aforementioned authors consider the underlying SLA model in their proposals [3], [20]. As far as we know, these works do not allow describing billing discounts as opposed to our proposal, even though they are commonly specified in customer agreements by cloud providers.…”

“…Within the highly dynamic and evolving cloud computing market, a proper service pricing and billing life cycle definition is crucial for providers and consumers alike. On the one hand, providers need to customise their service offerings, taking into account several aspects such as their own infrastructure, the target market, incurred costs, discount policies, purchasing options, and the actual billing process life cycle, which can vary from fixed billing during a period of time to a real-time, fluctuating price based on demandand-supply chains [1]- [3]. On the other hand, customers face an ever growing number of service offerings to choose from, where they need to analyse which are the optimal options with respect to their requirements and budget, as well as carefully monitor that the billing conforms to the Customer Agreement (CA) and especially to its associated Service Level Agreement (SLA) [4], [5], i.e.…”

Unifying Futures and Spot Market: Overbooking-Enabled Resource Trading in Mobile Edge Networks

“…Overbooking: "Booking" refers to a presale manner (rather than spot trading), where "overbooking" presents the presale of a volatile commodity or service in excess of actual supply, which has been shown to provide substantial utilization and profit advantage under "no shows" (some consumers will cancel the trading of requested service) [8], which, however, has been neglected in most previous mentioned works (namely, these works mainly consider equal-booking where the amount of resources for sale equals to the actual supply). The widespread adoption of overbooking techniques focus on many fields such as airlines and hotels [9], [10], spectrum reservation [11], [12], storage market [29], network slicing [30]- [32], cloud computing [7], [33]- [36], and fog computing [37]. Specifically, Liu et al in [11] proposed an opportunistic link overbooking scheme for an edge gateway to improve its link efficiency, and developed an integrated analytical framework for determining the suitable link overbooking factor.…”