15,847 research outputs found
Cloud/fog computing resource management and pricing for blockchain networks
The mining process in blockchain requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle,
which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high
computing power and energy needed. In this paper, we, for the first time,
consider edge computing as an enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we
study edge computing resource management and pricing to support mobile
blockchain applications in which the mining process of miners can be offloaded
to an edge computing service provider. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg
game to jointly maximize the profit of the edge computing service provider and
the individual utilities of the miners. In the first stage, the service
provider sets the price of edge computing nodes. In the second stage, the
miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices.
We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in
each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For the uniform
pricing where the same price is applied to all miners, the existence and
uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best
response strategies of the miners. For the discriminatory pricing where the
different prices are applied to different miners, the Stackelberg equilibrium
is proved to exist and be unique by capitalizing on the Variational Inequality
theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our
proposed model.Comment: 16 pages, double-column version, accepted by IEEE Internet of Things
Journa
Analysis of cloud storage prices
Cloud storage is fast securing its role as a major repository for both
consumers and business customers. Many companies now offer storage solutions,
sometimes for free for limited amounts of capacity. We have surveyed the
pricing plans of a selection of major cloud providers and compared them using
the unit price as the means of comparison. All the providers, excepting Amazon,
adopt a bundling pricing scheme; Amazon follows instead a block-declining
pricing policy. We compare the pricing plans through a double approach: a
pointwise comparison for each value of capacity, and an overall comparison
using a two-part tariff approximation and a Pareto-dominance criterion. Under
both approaches, most providers appear to offer pricing plans that are more
expensive and can be excluded from a procurement selection in favour of a
limited number of dominant providers.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, 17 reference
When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing
Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital
currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework.
Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g.,
finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile services is still
limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset
proof-of-work puzzles to add new data, i.e., a block, to the blockchain.
Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of
CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices.
To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things
systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious
solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first
introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we
introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management.
Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is
presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Magazin
HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges
High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to
on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business
analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the
cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise
environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid
environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud
resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources
and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which
range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying
platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the
discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large
users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a
survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is
ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can
help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly
relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from
big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR
Optimal Posted Prices for Online Cloud Resource Allocation
We study online resource allocation in a cloud computing platform, through a
posted pricing mechanism: The cloud provider publishes a unit price for each
resource type, which may vary over time; upon arrival at the cloud system, a
cloud user either takes the current prices, renting resources to execute its
job, or refuses the prices without running its job there. We design pricing
functions based on the current resource utilization ratios, in a wide array of
demand-supply relationships and resource occupation durations, and prove
worst-case competitive ratios of the pricing functions in terms of social
welfare. In the basic case of a single-type, non-recycled resource (i.e.,
allocated resources are not later released for reuse), we prove that our
pricing function design is optimal, in that any other pricing function can only
lead to a worse competitive ratio. Insights obtained from the basic cases are
then used to generalize the pricing functions to more realistic cloud systems
with multiple types of resources, where a job occupies allocated resources for
a number of time slots till completion, upon which time the resources are
returned back to the cloud resource pool
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