A Truthful Auction for Graph Job Allocation in Vehicular Cloud-assisted Networks

Vehicular cloud computing has emerged as a promising solution to fulfill users' demands on processing computation-intensive applications in modern driving environments. Such applications are commonly represented by graphs consisting of components and edges. However, encouraging vehicles to share resources poses significant challenges owing to users' selfishness. In this paper, an auction-based graph job allocation problem is studied in vehicular cloud-assisted networks considering resource reutilization. Our goal is to map each buyer (component) to a feasible seller (virtual machine) while maximizing the buyers' utility-of-service, which concerns the execution time and commission cost. First, we formulate the auction-based graph job allocation as an integer programming (IP) problem. Then, a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves based payment rule is proposed which satisfies the desired economical properties, truthfulness and individual rationality. We face two challenges: 1) the above-mentioned IP problem is NP-hard; 2) one constraint associated with the IP problem poses addressing the subgraph isomorphism problem. Thus, obtaining the optimal solution is practically infeasible in large-scale networks. Motivated by which, we develop a structure-preserved matching algorithm by maximizing the utility-of-service-gain, and the corresponding payment rule which offers economical properties and low computation complexity. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmark methods considering various problem sizes.