Elastic network service provisioning with VNF auctioning

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging approach that has received attention from both academia and industry as a way to improve flexibility, efficiency, and manageability of networks. NFV enables new ways to operate networks and to provide composite network services, opening the path toward new business models. As in cloud computing with the Infrastructure as a Service model, clients will be offered the ability to provision and instantiate Virtual Network Functions (VNF) on the NFV infrastructure of the network operators. In this paper, we consider the case where leftover VNF capacities are offered for bid. This approach is particularly interesting for clients to promptly provision resources to absorb peak or unpredictable demands and for operators to increase their revenues. We propose a game theoretic approach, using Multi-Unit Combinatorial Auctions to select the winning clients and the price they pay. Such a formulation allows clients to express their VNF requests according to their specific objectives. We solve this problem with a greedy heuristic and prove that this approximation of economic efficiency is the closest attainable in polynomial time and provides a payment system that motivates bidders to submit their true valuations. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic achieves a market valuation close to the optimal (less than 10% deviation) and guarantees that an important part of this valuation is paid as revenue to the operator.