Auction-Based Resource Allocation in Digital Ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed auction-based method for resource sharing among mobile devices, enabling efficient, fair, and low-cost resource allocation in digital ecosystems without central control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fully distributed auction mechanism for resource sharing among mobile devices, avoiding the need for centralized control and maximizing resource matches.

Findings

The approach achieves fair resource allocation.

It has low computational cost.

It outperforms some optimal strategies in simulations.

Abstract

The proliferation of portable devices (PDAs, smartphones, digital multimedia players, and so forth) allows mobile users to carry around a pool of computing, storage and communication resources. Sharing these resources with other users ("Digital Organisms" -- DOs) opens the door to novel interesting scenarios, where people trade resources to allow the execution, anytime and anywhere, of applications that require a mix of capabilities. In this paper we present a fully distributed approach for resource sharing among multiple devices owned by different mobile users. Our scheme enables DOs to trade computing/networking facilities through an auction-based mechanism, without the need of a central control. We use a set of numerical experiments to compare our approach with an optimal (centralized) allocation strategy that, given the set of resource demands and offers, maximizes the number of matches. Results confirm the effectiveness of our approach since it produces a fair allocation of resources with low computational cost, providing DOs with the means to form an altruistic digital ecosystem.