Bid-Price Control for Energy-Aware Pricing of Cloud Services

The amount of electrical energy consumed by Cloud computing resources keeps rising continuously. To exploit the full potential of reducing the carbon footprint, technical optimization of data center load and cooling distribution is not sufficient. We propose a method that motivates Cloud service providers to invest in energy-efficient infrastructure, which then allows for increasing revenue. The differentiation between conventional and green services offers the possibility to apply price discrimination approaches known from Revenue Management literature. Applying bid-price controlled pricing for the provider\u27s decision on accepting an incoming request bears the potential of increased revenue. We demonstrate the efficacy of the developed artifact through an experimental evaluation for various settings of supply and demand

Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing

In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases, a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page