EBay in the Clouds: False-Name-Proof Auctions for Cloud Resource Allocation

The paradigm of cloud computing has spontaneously prompted a wide interest in auction-based mechanisms for cloud resource allocation. To eliminate market manipulation, a number of strategy-proof (a.k.a. Truthful) cloud auction mechanisms have been recently proposed by enforcing bidders to bid their true valuations of the cloud resources. However, as discovered in this paper, they would suffer from a new cheating pattern, named false-name bids, where a bidder can gain profit by submitting bids under multiple fictitious names (e.g., Multiple e-mail addresses). Such false-name cheating is easy to make but hard to detect in cloud auctions. To tackle this issue, we propose FAITH, a new False-name-proof Auction for virtual machine instance allocation, that is proven both strategy-proof and false-name proof by our theoretical analysis. When N users compete for M different types of computing instances with multiple units, FAITH achieves a lower time complexity of O(N logN+NM) compared to exiting cloud auction designs. We further extend FAITH to support range-based requests as desired in practice for flexible auction. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show that FAITH highly improves auction efficiency, outperforming the extended mechanisms of conventional false-name-proof auctions in terms of generated revenue and social welfare by up to 220% and 140%, respectively.