Towards Incentive-Compatible Pricing for Bandwidth Reservation in Community Network Clouds

Abstract

Abstract. Community network clouds provide for applications of local interest deployed within community networks through collaborative efforts to provision cloud infrastructures. They complement the traditional large-scale public cloud providers similar to the model of decentralised edge clouds by bringing both content and computation closer to the users at the edges of the network. Services and applications within community network clouds require connectivity to the Internet and to the resources external to the community network, and here the current besteffort model of volunteers contributing gateway access in the community networks falls short. We model the problem of reserving the bandwidth at such gateways for guaranteeing quality-of-service for the cloud applications, and evaluate different pricing mechanisms for their suitability in ensuring maximal social welfare and eliciting truthful requests from the users. We find second-price auction based mechanisms, including Vickrey and generalised second price auctions, suitable for the bandwidth allocation problem at the gateways in the community networks.

Resource Management in Cloud Networking Using Economic Analysis and Pricing Models: A Survey

“…Mobile data offloading service Three contract theoretic models for the service trading are used, that are perfect discrimination, linear pricing, and anti adverse selection. In particular for the anti adverse selection, the seller determines the optimal prices and the amounts of bandwidth using the Lagrange multiplier method [285] • Overcome the information asymmetry • Support multiple traffic-payment bundles • Support only one SDN controller [287] • Adapt to both real-time and non-real-time service requests • Be resilient to demand fluctuations • Support only one service provider 2) Collusion in auction: Apart from the false-name bidding cheating, bidders in the reviewed approaches based on auction, i.e., the VCG auction [124], [224], the combinatorial auction [192], and the double auction [190], [207], [209], [210], [229], may collude with each other through coordinating their bids. This suppresses the competition for cloud resource, thus reducing the price that the bidders must pay for the cloud resource.…”

“…They need to access the external resources via a gateway of a bandwidth provider [223]. The authors in [224] considered allocating bandwidth to users so as to maximize the provider's revenue. Additionally, it must ensure the social welfare maximization for the users even if they can lie about their priority to get higher utility.…”

“…• Support only one service provider 2) Collusion in auction: Apart from the false-name bidding cheating, bidders in the reviewed approaches based on auction, i.e., the VCG auction [124], [224], the combinatorial auction [192], and the double auction [190], [207], [209], [210], [229], may collude with each other through coordinating their bids. This suppresses the competition for cloud resource, thus reducing the price that the bidders must pay for the cloud resource.…”

Assessing Trends of Existing Research Contribution Towards Internet-of-Things

“…Thomas and Irvine [75] have carried out an investigation of bandwidth allocation consider LTE networks as well as the sensor network. Khan et al [76] have presented a technique for reserving bandwidth over the cloud. The concept is very much close to IoT applications.…”

Economics behind ICT infrastructure management

“…The cloud adoption must also be supported by open markets, enabling negotiation processes for handling ambiguous selection criteria (Pittl et al 2017;Slawik et al 2016;Filiopoulou et al 2017). From the provider point of view, a pay-per-use model of the cloud implies solving the problem of proposing pricing schemas based on all involved cost such as the energy consumption of virtual machines (Kostopoulos et al 2016;Kavanagh et al 2016;Altmann and Kashef 2014), or it can require new ways for maintaining cloud infrastructures such as community network clouds (Khan et al 2016).…”