A Near Optimal Mechanism for Energy Aware Scheduling.

With the increased popularity of cloud computing it is of paramount importance to understand energy-efficiency from a game-theoretic perspective. An important question is how the operator of a server should deal with combining energy-efficiency and the particular interests of the users. Consider a cloud server, where clients/agents can submit jobs for processing. The quality of service that each agent perceives is given by a non-decreasing function of the completion time of her job which is private information. The server has to process the jobs and charge each agent while trying to optimize the social cost, defined as the energy expenditure plus the sum of the values of the cost functions of the agents. The operator would like to design a mechanism in order to optimize this objective, which ideally is computationally tractable, charges the users “fairly” and induces a game with an equilibrium.