1 Resource Management in Cloud Networking Using Economic Analysis and Pricing Models: A Survey Nguyen Cong Luong, Ping Wang, Senior Member, IEEE, Dusit Niyato, Fellow, IEEE, Wen Yonggang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Zhu Han, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—This paper presents a comprehensive literature re- with each other through high speed networks. For example, view on applications of economic and pricing models for resource the EU-funded Scalable and Adaptive Internet Solution (Eu- management in cloud networking. To achieve sustainable profit funded SAIL) project [9] investigates a combination of cloud advantage, cost reduction, and flexibility in provisioning of cloud resources, resource management in cloud networking requires computing infrastructure and networking capabilities, called adaptive and robust designs to address many issues, e.g., resource cloud networking. Cloud networking actually considers the allocation, bandwidth reservation, request allocation, and work- network beyond the data centers with the aim of providing load allocation. Economic and pricing models have received a lot both on-demand computing and network resources. With cloud of attention as they can lead to desirable performance in terms networking, the resources and services can be provisioned of social welfare, fairness, truthfulness, profit, user satisfaction, and resource utilization. This paper reviews applications of the from interconnecting distributed data centers owned by one economic and pricing models to develop adaptive algorithms and or multiple providers, called cloud data center networking. protocols for resource management in cloud networking. Besides, The cloud resources and services can also be integrated with we survey a variety of incentive mechanisms using the pricing mobile networks, i.e., mobile cloud networking. Moreover, strategies in sharing resources in edge computing. In addition, we edge computing models are deployed in cloud networking to consider using pricing models in cloud-based Software Defined Wireless Networking (cloud-based SDWN). Finally, we highlight bring the cloud resources and services close to users, and important challenges, open issues and future research directions thus minimize overall costs, jitter, latencies, and network load. of applying economic and pricing models to cloud networking. The aforementioned models of cloud networking along with Keywords- Cloud networking, resource management, pricing the integration of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) models, economic models. technology are expected to support and satisfy a large number of users and applications in terms of flexibility, cost and I. INTRODUCTION availability of the services. However, managing network and cloud resources together in Cloud computing is becoming the platform of choice for a cloud networking has many challenges. It is crucial to have an number of applications due to the advantages of high com- integrated view of the existing physical and virtual topologies puting power, low service cost, high scalability, accessibility, and characteristics of the resources, as well as the status of and availability. Cloud computing is used as an integral part of all network entities. Besides, the provisioning and placement society in various domains and disciplines such as education of virtual resources must be done in the best way possible, [1], commerce [2], health care services [3], transportation [4], taking into account the available resources of both the cloud and social networks [5]. Cloud computing is expected to bring and networks. Moreover, the reconfigurations must often be huge new revenue opportunities. Recent reports have showed performed to resize or release the existing virtual resources that the global revenue generated from cloud services is more due to, e.g., the dynamic network environments (node or link than $200 billion in 2016, and there will be approximately arXiv:1701.01963v1 [cs.GT] 8 Jan 2017 failure), and the variability/elasticity of resource demand. In- 3.6 billion Internet users accessing cloud services by 2018 efficient resource management negatively affects performance (http://www.statista.com). On-demand services provided by and cost as well as impairing system functionality. cloud computing include, for example, Software-as-a-Service To address the aforementioned challenges, it is vital to (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a- develop resource management approaches which guarantee Service (IaaS). Google Docs [6], Google App Engine [7], the scalability, efficiency, manageability, adaptability and reli- and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon’s EC2) [8] ability for cloud networking. Traditional approaches, e.g., the are among the popular commercial services available in cloud system optimization, merely focus on the system performance computing. metrics given system parameters and constraints rather than The cloud computing infrastructure is typically hosted in economic factors, e.g., the profit, cost, and revenue. Therefore, data centers. Therefore, the current cloud services are based on economic and pricing approaches have been recently explored, parallel implementations in distributed data centers connected developed, and adopted for resource management in cloud net- N. C. Luong, P. Wang, D. Niyato, and Y. Wen, are with School of Computer working. Compared with the system optimization approaches, Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. E- the economic and pricing approaches provide the following mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and advantages: [email protected]. Z. Han is with Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, • In cloud networking, the profits of cloud providers have to University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. be maximized while meeting the user demands. Thus, the 2 profit guarantee for all cloud providers is a primary goal. motivates us to develop the survey with the comprehensive Pricing models based on, e.g., the profit maximization or literature review on the economic and pricing models in cloud cost minimization, have been efficiently used to achieve networking. the goal. For convenience, the related works in this survey are • There are various actors/stakeholders in cloud network- classified based on various models of cloud networking and ing which belong to different entities, e.g., end-users, then their issues as shown in Table II. The models of cloud infrastructure providers, service providers, brokers, and networking considered in this survey are cloud data center network operators. They have different objectives, e.g., networking, mobile cloud networking, edge computing, and the profit, revenue, cost and utility, as well as different cloud-based Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems. Furthermore, constraints, e.g., the budget and technology. Their objec- some pricing approaches for the resource management in tives often conflict with each other, and this makes eco- cloud-based Software Defined Wireless Networking (cloud- nomic and pricing models become effective tools in cloud based SDWN) are discussed. Advantages and disadvantages networking. More specifically, through the use of negoti- of each approach are highlighted. ation mechanisms, economic and pricing approaches can The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II determine optimal solutions for selfish entities given their describes a general architecture of cloud networking. Sec- constraints. tion III introduces the fundamentals of economic and pricing • The demand for cloud computing and network resources models. Section IV discusses how to apply economic and depends on many users’ attributes, e.g., the willingness pricing models for resource management in cloud data center to pay and performance requirements. Pricing strategies networking such as bandwidth, request, and workload alloca- which rely on the demand elasticity such as price dis- tion. Applications of economic and pricing models for resource crimination have been recently used as ideal solutions allocation in mobile cloud networking are given in Section V. to optimize the provisioning of resources and profits of Section VI reviews economic and pricing models to address providers. issues concerning the bandwidth allocation, task allocation, • Video on Demand (VoD) undoubtedly is among the most and storage sharing in edge computing. Section VII considers important services in cloud networking. Several commer- economic and pricing approaches for bandwidth allocation cial video delivery services have been introduced and and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) caching in cloud-based VoD system. become popular, e.g., YouTube and Netflix. However, the In addition, applications of economic and pricing models for bandwidth cost of the service is typically very significant. bandwidth allocation and mobile data offloading in cloud- Pricing mechanisms, e.g., smart data pricing, have been based SDWN are given in Section VIII. We outline important applied to regulate the user demands and maximize the challenges, open issues, and future research directions in bandwidth utilization. Section IX. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section X. The • Besides the high bandwidth utilization for providers, list of abbreviations appeared in this paper are given in Table I. guaranteeing quality of service (QoS), e.g., a small delay, for users is very important. Pricing approaches provide II. GENERAL ARCHITECTURE OF CLOUD NETWORKING very efficient solutions for the joint optimization of both