A Truthful Dynamic Workflow Scheduling Mechanism for Commercial Multicloud Environments

Abstract

The ultimate goal of cloud providers by providing resources is increasing their revenues. This goal leads to a selfish behavior that negatively affects the users of a commercial multicloud environment. In this paper, we introduce a pricing model and a truthful mechanism for scheduling single tasks considering two objectives: monetary cost and completion time. With respect to the social cost of the mechanism, i.e., minimizing the completion time and monetary cost, we extend the mechanism for dynamic scheduling of scientific workflows. We theoretically analyze the truthfulness and the efficiency of the mechanism and present extensive experimental results showing significant impact of the selfish behavior of the cloud providers on the efficiency of the whole system. The experiments conducted using real-world and synthetic workflow applications demonstrate that our solutions dominate in most cases the Pareto-optimal solutions estimated by two classical multiobjective evolutionary algorithms.