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Dynamic Pricing for Maximizing Cloud Revenue: A Column Generation Approach

Published: 05 January 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Virtualization underpins the emergence of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to provide service delivery. Even with virtualized resources, the cloud industry suffers from underutilization off the peak load periods. Hence it is essential for a pricing mechanism to satisfy both customers' demands and budgets as well as maximizing the cloud revenue. The limited works on dynamic pricing consider selling the entire population of VMs in the cloud, resulting in increased processing time and risk. Motivated by the aforementioned concerns, this paper proposes a dynamic pricing model that strives to minimize the inevitable stagnant VMs, while working to maximize cloud revenue. In particular, this paper explores the factors that drive price dynamism following the pay-as-you-go pricing scheme that is rapidly adopted in cloud services. We present a new dynamic pricing approach based on a linear programming relaxation of Stochastic Markov Decision processes. To further reduce the high dimensionality, we employ column generation. Numerical evaluations show practical scalability, as well as prominent influences that could be adopted by cloud providers for revenue maximization.

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ICDCN '17: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
January 2017
367 pages
ISBN:9781450348393
DOI:10.1145/3007748
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 January 2017

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Author Tags

  1. Cloud computing
  2. Column generation
  3. Dynamic price
  4. Dynamic programming
  5. IaaS
  6. Spot instances
  7. Virtual machines

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