A truthful approximation mechanism for autonomic virtual machine provisioning and allocation in clouds

Abstract

One of the major challenges faced by the cloud providers is to allocate and provision the resources such that their profit is maximized and the resources are utilized efficiently. We address this challenge by designing an autonomic VM (Virtual Machine) provisioning and allocation mechanism that adapts to the changing user demands. We show that the proposed mechanism is a PTAS (Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme) and that it is truthful, that is, the users do not have incentives to lie about their requested bundles of VM instances and their valuations. We perform extensive experiments in order to investigate the properties of the mechanism.