An economic market for the brokering of time and budget guarantees

Grids offer best effort services to users. Service level agreements offer the opportunity to provide guarantees upon services offered, in such a way that it captures the users’ requirements, while also considering concerns of the service providers. This is achieved via a process of converging requirements and service cost values from both sides towards an agreement. This paper presents the intelligent scheduling for quality of service market-oriented mechanism for brokering guarantees upon completion time and cost for jobs submitted to a batch-oriented compute service. Web Services agreement (negotiation) is used along with the planning of schedules in determining pricing, ensuring that jobs become prioritised depending on their budget constraints. An evaluation is performed to demonstrate how market mechanisms can be used to achieve this, whilst also showing the effects that scheduling algorithms can have upon the market in terms of rescheduling. The evaluation is completed with a comparison of the broker’s capabilities in relation to the literature

Scheduling of data-intensive workloads in a brokered virtualized environment

Providing performance predictability guarantees is increasingly important in cloud platforms, especially for data-intensive applications, for which performance depends greatly on the available rates of data transfer between the various computing/storage hosts underlying the virtualized resources assigned to the application. With the increased prevalence of brokerage services in cloud platforms, there is a need for resource management solutions that consider the brokered nature of these workloads, as well as the special demands of their intra-dependent components. In this paper, we present an offline mechanism for scheduling batches of brokered data-intensive workloads, which can be extended to an online setting. The objective of the mechanism is to decide on a packing of the workloads in a batch that minimizes the broker's incurred costs, Moreover, considering the brokered nature of such workloads, we define a payment model that provides incentives to these workloads to be scheduled as part of a batch, which we analyze theoretically. Finally, we evaluate the proposed scheduling algorithm, and exemplify the fairness of the payment model in practical settings via trace-based experiments

Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography

This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is continually updated on the webpage \url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail (\textit{[email protected]})

Unsplittable Load Balancing in a Network of Charging Stations Under QoS Guarantees

The operation of the power grid is becoming more stressed, due to the addition of new large loads represented by Electric Vehicles (EVs) and a more intermittent supply due to the incorporation of renewable sources. As a consequence, the coordination and control of projected EV demand in a network of fast charging stations becomes a critical and challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic based decentralized control mechanism to alleviate negative impacts from the EV demand. The proposed mechanism takes into consideration the non-uniform spatial distribution of EVs that induces uneven power demand at each charging facility, and aims to: (i) avoid straining grid resources by offering price incentives so that customers accept being routed to less busy stations, (ii) maximize total revenue by serving more customers with the same amount of grid resources, and (iii) provide charging service to customers with a certain level of Quality-of-Service (QoS), the latter defined as the long term customer blocking probability. We examine three scenarios of increased complexity that gradually approximate real world settings. The obtained results show that the proposed framework leads to substantial performance improvements in terms of the aforementioned goals, when compared to current state of affairs.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Transactions on Smart Gri

Subsidization Competition: Vitalizing the Neutral Internet

Unlike telephone operators, which pay termination fees to reach the users of another network, Internet Content Providers (CPs) do not pay the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of users they reach. While the consequent cross subsidization to CPs has nurtured content innovations at the edge of the Internet, it reduces the investment incentives for the access ISPs to expand capacity. As potential charges for terminating CPs' traffic are criticized under the net neutrality debate, we propose to allow CPs to voluntarily subsidize the usagebased fees induced by their content traffic for end-users. We model the regulated subsidization competition among CPs under a neutral network and show how deregulation of subsidization could increase an access ISP's utilization and revenue, strengthening its investment incentives. Although the competition might harm certain CPs, we find that the main cause comes from high access prices rather than the existence of subsidization. Our results suggest that subsidization competition will increase the competitiveness and welfare of the Internet content market; however, regulators might need to regulate access prices if the access ISP market is not competitive enough. We envision that subsidization competition could become a viable model for the future Internet

On the Economics of Cloud Markets

Cloud computing is a paradigm that has the potential to transform and revolutionalize the next generation IT industry by making software available to end-users as a service. A cloud, also commonly known as a cloud network, typically comprises of hardware (network of servers) and a collection of softwares that is made available to end-users in a pay-as-you-go manner. Multiple public cloud providers (ex., Amazon) co-existing in a cloud computing market provide similar services (software as a service) to its clients, both in terms of the nature of an application, as well as in quality of service (QoS) provision. The decision of whether a cloud hosts (or finds it profitable to host) a service in the long-term would depend jointly on the price it sets, the QoS guarantees it provides to its customers, and the satisfaction of the advertised guarantees. In this paper, we devise and analyze three inter-organizational economic models relevant to cloud networks. We formulate our problems as non co-operative price and QoS games between multiple cloud providers existing in a cloud market. We prove that a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) exists in two of the three models. Our analysis paves the path for each cloud provider to 1) know what prices and QoS level to set for end-users of a given service type, such that the provider could exist in the cloud market, and 2) practically and dynamically provision appropriate capacity for satisfying advertised QoS guarantees.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Limits To Certainty in QoS Pricing and Bandwidth

Advanced services require more reliable bandwidth than currently provided by the Internet Protocol, even with the reliability enhancements provided by TCP. More reliable bandwidth will be provided through QoS (quality of service), as currently discussed widely. Yet QoS has some implications beyond providing ubiquitous access to advance Internet service, which are of interest from a policy perspective. In particular, what are the implications for price of Internet services? Further, how will these changes impact demand and universal service for the Internet. This paper explores the relationship between certainty of bandwidth and certainty of price for Internet services over a statistically shared network and finds that these are mutually exclusive goals.Comment: 29th TPRC Conference, 200