Vol.:(0123456789) SN Computer Science (2021) 2:483 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-021-00907-y SN Computer Science ORIGINAL RESEARCH Fair Resource Allocation Policies in Reverse Auction‑Based Cloud Market Dinesh Kumar 1  · Gaurav Baranwal 2  · Deo Prakash Vidyarthi 3 Received: 16 May 2021 / Accepted: 26 September 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2021 Abstract The increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and their dependence on cloud computing for computational services has resulted in the cloud market’s growth. This growth has attracted many business organizations to offer cloud ser- vices, leading to significant competition amongst the cloud service providers. Reverse auction has been widely used to model such competition when there are many cloud service providers. A study on fair resource allocation mechanisms is performed in this work, and a family of such mechanisms is proposed. This work considers a reverse auction-based cloud market where users submit their combinatorial bids. This work emphasizes the importance of fairness in cloud resource allocation and its implementation in a cloud market. The proposed priority-based fair resource allocation mechanisms remove the bidder drop problem in a cloud market where a few major cloud providers dominate and control the whole market. Performance of the proposed fair resource allocation mechanisms is studied based on various metrics such as the number of winning auction rounds, providers’ revenue, users’ procurement cost, etc., in a simulated environment. It is observed that the naïve and not well-established providers in the market also win when fair mechanisms based on priority methods are implemented. They also get a chance to win the auction and can offer the resources successfully to the customer. Keywords Fairness · Resource allocation · Combinatorial auction · Cloud computing · Internet of Things (IoT) Introduction Two emerging technologies, Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT), have evolved to complement each other. Due to their complementary nature, each may take advan- tage of the other. For example, IoT can be benefited from the virtually unlimited processing and storage capacities of the Cloud, whereas Cloud can be benefited from IoT by spreading its scope to provide a variety of services in vari- ous real-life scenarios. It further creates opportunities for an IoT system by doing data integration, aggregation, sharing and analysis. Cloud computing is a business model of computing para- digm in which computing resources and services are pro- vided to its users over the internet on a pay-per-use basis [1]. It has brought a revolutionary change in the IT indus- try by delivering virtualized resources as a service [2]. US ‘National Institute of Standards and Technology,’ i.e. NIST defines Cloud Computing as: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., net- works, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal manage- ment effort or service provider interaction” [3]. Resource pooling, on-demand self-service, elasticity, pay-per-use, etc., are some of the fundamental characteristics of cloud computing [2]. In a Cloud environment, Cloud offers the resources to its clients who pay for the resource usage. Thus, it is always desired that the deal should be beneficial to both parties for * Dinesh Kumar dinesh.kumar@mnnit.ac.in Gaurav Baranwal gaurav.baranwal@bhu.ac.in Deo Prakash Vidyarthi dpv@mail.jnu.ac.in 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, Prayagraj, UP 211004, India 2 Department of Computer Science, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, UP 221005, India 3 School of Computer and Systems Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067, India