Volume 16, Number 5

Resources Price Adjustment in Cloud Computing for Load Balancing and Fairness Between Users and Suppliers

  Authors

Lilia Chourou Gherir¹, Ahmed Elleuch² and Mohamed Jemni¹, ¹University of Tunis, Tunisia, ²University of Manouba, Tunisia

  Abstract

Resource price adjustment is a challenging issue when building a cloud computing system. For this purpose, we present an approach that adopts a market-driven price adjustment model as an economic incentive model and ensures the balance between supply and demand. We show how this model may be adapted and applied to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in cloud computing. We place ourselves in the context of the virtual machines market. To achieve competitive equilibrium, prices are adjusted according to a tâtonnement-like process. The prices are computed by a third party, the auctioneer. However, this process requires several assumptions to ensure the existence and stability of competitive equilibrium, not all of which are verified by cloud computing systems. The atomicity and convexity of preferences are not guaranteed by cloud computing systems. These questions will be the subject of our empirical study. We find empirically that the change in the sign of excess demand, indicating the existence of equilibrium, occurs between two similar prices. The experimental results show that the proposed dynamic price adjustment approach is more profitable than fixed-price pricing, allowing dynamic suppliers to become important market agents.

  Keywords

Cloud Computing, Pricing, Virtual Machines Market, Competitive Equilibrium, Auctioneer.