C2TOP: A Cloud Competition-based Truthful Online Pricing Mechanism in Secondary Markets

Flexibility and the ability of cost management have made on-demand price scheduling as one of the most favourable choices of cloud service users. This mechanism is not appealing for cloud service providers at the same level because it cannot provide the required information to anticipate and provide future market demands. Instead, cloud service providers are more inclined to use Futures contracts. However, these methods do not provide the flexibility and cost management that on-demand methods provide for service users. Cloud secondary markets emerged to meet the needs of both sides of the market: 1) cloud service providers, 2)cloud service users, where brokers and reseller buyers act as intermediaries to provide the demanded services for service users. There is high competition among service providers to attract service users and among service users to find appropriate services, and also there are high fluctuations in environmental parameters, such as price and the volume of supply and demand. These are the reasons that designing an appropriate pricing algorithm and resource allocation mechanism is of great importance. In this paper, we propose a competition-based price scheduling mechanism that considers the inherent competition and fluctuation attributes of such environments. The provided experimental results show that our mechanism is superior to other methods, such as fixed and history-based pricing mechanisms, in terms of utility and resource allocation efficiency.