Lease Data Center in the Light of Network Resources: An Economic Model

Abstract

Current data centers in cloud computing have flexible mechanisms to lease compute resources, but provide little control mechanism to share network resource. Traffic flows from different tenants' VMs will competing network resource on the substrate network, thus can resulting in unpredictable performance degradation. This paper proposes an economic model for fair leasing the network resource between tenants. Leveraging network virtualization technology, VMs from different tenants on same physical machine are assigned into different virtual links, and a hierarchical game is presented for virtual bandwidth allocation. In the game, the data center owner as a leader designs a pricing mechanism for bandwidth allocation, each VM as a follower chooses a willingness-to-pay to maximize its own profit. Experimental results show that the bandwidth allocation between tenants is efficient and fair.