OMTiR: Open Market for Trading Idle Cloud Resources

Abstract

Although cloud computing is a thriving technology trend in industry and academy, the resource renting cost is still the main obstacle for users to switch to cloud. The existing pricing models are not flexible enough for users. On-demand pricing model does not guarantee resource availability, while reserved pricing model may result in high risk of resource wasting. In this paper, we propose OMTiR: An Open Market for Trading Idle Cloud Resources, enabling users to sell their unused or underutilized resources on negotiable prices. Consequently, users, either as a resource seller or buyer, can reduce the resource renting cost. In addition, the cloud provider can increase revenue by taking arbitrage profit in the market and serving more users using the same amount of resource. A comparative study is conducted using a real world workload trace to show the advantages of the open market model over the existing price models in terms of resource utilization rate and task waiting time.