Coordinating Services and Networks with NaaS Tickets towards Service Customization in Distributed Clouds

Distributed clouds decentralize cloud resources, moving from a single high-level point in the network to multiple low-level points, allowing for the dynamic distribution of services across the “cloud-edge-end”. Nevertheless, the “best-effort” traditional networks suffer from unpredictable service quality and limited collaboration between services and networks. To address these shortcomings, we present a novel solution named “Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) Tickets,” inspired by traffic tickets in transportation systems to empower distributed clouds with customized service capabilities. Specifically, we first propose NaaS Tickets-enabled service-customized distributed clouds (NT-SCDC) to realize on-demand and service-oriented interconnection in a wide area. To establish a solid connection between services and networks, we introduce an auction-driven matching mechanism for NaaS Tickets. Then, the matching problem is formulated via an online framework MatOnline, which translates the long-term market problem into a series of one-shot auctions for NaaS Tickets. Based on the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, we develop MatVCG algorithm to handle one-shot matching problems, guaranteeing truthfulness, individual rationality, and social welfare. Moreover, we improve the performance of MatOnline to find the minimum feasible scale-down ratio with reduced budget expenditure. Experimental results demonstrate our algorithm achieves a stable competitive ratio on social welfare, effectively meeting customized demands