Addressing strategic behavior in a deployed microeconomic resource allocator.

While market-based systems have long been proposed as solutions for distributed resource allocation, few have been deployed for production use in real computer systems. Towards this end, we present our initial experience using Mirage, a microeconomic resource allocation system based on a repeated combinatorial auction. Mirage allocates time on a heavily-used 148-node wireless sensor network testbed. In particular, we focus on observed strategic user behavior over a four-month period in which 312,148 node hours were allocated across 11 research projects. Based on these results, we present a set of key challenges for market-based resource allocation systems based on repeated combinatorial auctions. Finally, we propose refinements to the system's current auction scheme to mitigate the strategies observed to date and also comment on some initial steps toward building an approximately strategyproof repeated combinatorial auction.