Publication - Automated Negotiation with Decommitment for Dynamic Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing

Authors: An, Bo; Lesser, Victor; Irwin, David; Zink, Michael
Title: Automated Negotiation with Decommitment for Dynamic Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing
Abstract: We consider the problem of allocating networked resources in dynamic environment, such as cloud computing platforms, where providers strategically price resources to maximize their utility. Resource allocation in these environments, where both providers and consumers are selfish agents, presents numerous challenges since the number of consumers and their resource demand is highly dynamic. While numerous auction-based approaches have been proposed in the literature, this paper explores an alternative approach where providers and consumers automatically negotiate resource leasing contracts. Since resource demand and supply can be dynamic and uncertain, we propose a distributed negotiation mechanism where agents negotiate over both a contract price and a decommitment penalty, which allows agents to decommit from contracts at a cost. We compare our approach experimentally, using representative scenarios and workloads, to both combinatorial auctions and the fixed-price model used by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and show that the negotiation model achieves a higher social welfare.
Keywords: Negotiation
Publication: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 981 - 988
Location: Toronto
Date: 2010
Sources: PDF: /Documents/bo-an_aamas10a.pdf
Reference: An, Bo; Lesser, Victor; Irwin, David; Zink, Michael . Automated Negotiation with Decommitment for Dynamic Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 981-988. 2010.
bibtex: 
@inproceedings{An-484,
  author    = "Bo An and Victor Lesser and David Irwin and
               Michael  Zink",
  title     = "{Automated Negotiation with Decommitment for
               Dynamic Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing}",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on
               Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems",
  pages     = "981-988",
  year      = "2010",
  address   = "Toronto",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/484",
}