Elastic Network Service Provisioning with VNF Auctioning
28th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 28), Würzburg, Germany, (September 2016)Abstract
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging approach that has
received attention from both academia and industry as a way to improve
flexibility, efficiency, and manageability of networks.
NFV enables new ways to operate networks and to provide composite network
services, opening the path toward new business models.
As in cloud computing with the Infrastructure as a Service model, clients
will be offered the capability to provision and instantiate Virtual Network
Functions (VNF) on the NFV infrastructure of the network operators.
In this paper, we consider the case where leftover VNF capacities are
offered for bid. This approach is particularly interesting for clients to
punctually provision resources to absorb peak or unpredictable demands and
for operators to increase their revenues.
We propose a game theoretic approach and make use of Multi-Unit
Combinatorial Auctions to select the winning clients and the price they
pay.
Such a formulation allows clients to express their VNF requests according
to their specific objectives.
We solve this problem with a greedy heuristic and prove that this
approximation of economic efficiency is the closest attainable in
polynomial time and provides a payment system that motivates bidders to
submit their true valuations.
Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic achieves a market
valuation close to the optimal (less than 10 % deviation) and guarantees
that an important part of this valuation is paid as revenue to the
operator.
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