Incentivizing Microservices for Online Resource Sharing in Edge Clouds

The microservice architecture provides high agility, making it a suitable choice for implementing edge cloud services. Provisioning microservices at the network edge requires the dynamic allocation of resources. However, due to the resource limitation in the edge cloud environment, there is no guarantee that enough resources are always available upon a microservice's requests. In this paper, we design an online auction-based mechanism to incentivize microservices to spare their occupied resources so that the edge cloud platform can reclaim them and reallocate them to other microservices that need resources. We firstly design a single-stage auction that determines the winning bids to satisfy the resource demands in polynomial time, while calculating the payments. Then, we design an online framework to tie a series of such single-stage auctions into a multi-stage online mechanism without requiring the knowledge of future bids and demands. Via rigorous analysis, we exhibit that our mechanism design achieves truthful bidding and individual rationality, with a constant competitive ratio regarding the social cost of the system in the long run. Finally, we verify the practical performance of our mechanism through extensive simulations.