An Auction Mechanism for Resource Allocation in Mobile Cloud Computing Systems

A mobile cloud computing system is composed of heterogeneous services and resources to be allocated by the cloud service provider to mobile cloud users. On one hand, some of these resources are substitutable (e.g., users can use storage from different places) that they have similar functions to the users. On the other hand, some resources are complementary that the user will need them as a bundle (e.g., users need both wireless connection and storage for online photo posting). In this paper, we first model the resource allocation process of a mobile cloud computing system as an auction mechanism with premium and discount factors. The premium and discount factors indicate complementary and substitutable relations among cloud resources provided by the service provider. Then, we analyze the individual rationality and incentive compatibility (truthfulness) properties of the users in the proposed auction mechanism. The optimal solutions of the resource allocation and cost charging schemes in the auction mechanism is discussed afterwards

Towards an efficient distributed cloud architecture

Cloud computing is an emerging field in computer science. Users are utilizing less of their own existing resources, while increasing usage of cloud resources. There are many advantages of distributed computing over centralized architecture. With increase in number of unused storage and computing resources and advantages of distributed computing resulted in distributed cloud computing. In the distributed cloud environment that we propose, resource providers (RP) compete to provide resources to the users. In the distributed cloud all the cloud computing and storage services are offered by distributed resources. In this architecture resources are used and provided by the users in a peer to peer fashion. We propose using multi-valued distributed hash tables for efficient resource discovery. Leveraging the fact that there are many users providing resources such as CPU and memory, we define these resources under one key to easily locate devices with equivalent resources. We then propose a new auction mechanism, using a reserve bid formulated rationally by each user for the optimal allocation of discovered resources. We have evaluated the performance of resource discovery mechanisms for the distributed cloud and distributed cloud storage and compared the results with existing DHTs, peer to peer clients such as VUZE and explored the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed schemes in terms of resource/service discovery and allocation. We use a simultaneous Auction mechanism and select a set of winners once we receive all contributions or bids. In a real world scenario, users request resources with multiple capabilities, and in order to find such resources we use a contribution mechanism where service providers will provide a contribution price to users for providing a resource. Users use our proposed auction mechanism to select the resources from the set of resource providers. We show that Nash equilibrium can be achieved and how we can avoid the problem of free riders in the distributed cloud. Network latency is an important factor when deciding which resource provider to select. We used treeple a secure latency estimation scheme to obtain network measurements in distributed systems. We developed a mobile application using distributed cloud which preserves privacy and provides security for a user. Distributed cloud is used for developing such an application where all the data needs to be close to the users and avoids single point of failure, which is the problem with existing cloud

POEM: Pricing Longer for Edge Computing in the Device Cloud

Multiple access mobile edge computing has been proposed as a promising technology to bring computation services close to end users, by making good use of edge cloud servers. In mobile device clouds (MDC), idle end devices may act as edge servers to offer computation services for busy end devices. Most existing auction based incentive mechanisms in MDC focus on only one round auction without considering the time correlation. Moreover, although existing single round auctions can also be used for multiple times, users should trade with higher bids to get more resources in the cascading rounds of auctions, then their budgets will run out too early to participate in the next auction, leading to auction failures and the whole benefit may suffer. In this paper, we formulate the computation offloading problem as a social welfare optimization problem with given budgets of mobile devices, and consider pricing longer of mobile devices. This problem is a multiple-choice multi-dimensional 0-1 knapsack problem, which is a NP-hard problem. We propose an auction framework named MAFL for long-term benefits that runs a single round resource auction in each round. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed auction mechanism outperforms the single round by about 55.6% on the revenue on average and MAFL outperforms existing double auction by about 68.6% in terms of the revenue.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, Accepted by the 18th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP

Profitable Task Allocation in Mobile Cloud Computing

We propose a game theoretic framework for task allocation in mobile cloud computing that corresponds to offloading of compute tasks to a group of nearby mobile devices. Specifically, in our framework, a distributor node holds a multidimensional auction for allocating the tasks of a job among nearby mobile nodes based on their computational capabilities and also the cost of computation at these nodes, with the goal of reducing the overall job completion time. Our proposed auction also has the desired incentive compatibility property that ensures that mobile devices truthfully reveal their capabilities and costs and that those devices benefit from the task allocation. To deal with node mobility, we perform multiple auctions over adaptive time intervals. We develop a heuristic approach to dynamically find the best time intervals between auctions to minimize unnecessary auctions and the accompanying overheads. We evaluate our framework and methods using both real world and synthetic mobility traces. Our evaluation results show that our game theoretic framework improves the job completion time by a factor of 2-5 in comparison to the time taken for executing the job locally, while minimizing the number of auctions and the accompanying overheads. Our approach is also profitable for the nearby nodes that execute the distributor's tasks with these nodes receiving a compensation higher than their actual costs