Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing

We propose a coalition formation protocol based on combinatorial auctions. The PC2P protocol could be at the heart of self-organization and self-management in utility computing where agents respond to reservation requests for packages of services. Individual supply agents do not posses sufficient resources to satisfy the requests made by consumer agents and must form coalitions. The protocol consists of two stages; the first one exploits spatial locality for the formation of sub-coalitions of supply agents; a Paxos-type algorithm is used for reaching consensus on a minimum price per unit of service for every service advertised by the sub-coalition. The second stage is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases, a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction for the package of services requested by each client. The resulting coalition includes all sub-coalitions with winning bids. The protocol strikes a balance between the profit for the agents supplying the service and the ability to offer low-cost services. We also report on the results of a preliminary protocol investigation.