  Cloud computing has been an emerging model which aims at allowing customers
to utilize computing resources hosted by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). More
and more consumers rely on CSPs to supply computing and storage service on the
one hand, and CSPs try to attract consumers on favorable terms on the other. In
such competitive cloud computing markets, pricing policies are critical to
market efficiency. While CSPs often publish their prices and charge users
according to the amount of resources they consume, auction mechanism is rarely
applied. In fact a feasible auction mechanism is the most effective method for
allocation of resources, especially double auction is more efficient and
flexible for it enables buyers and sellers to enter bids and offers
simultaneously. In this paper we bring up an electronic auction platform for
cloud, and a cloud Continuous Double Auction (CDA) mechanism is formulated to
match orders and facilitate trading based on the platform. Some evaluating
criteria are defined to analyze the efficiency of markets and strategies.
Furthermore, the selection of bidding strategies for the auction plays a very
important role for each player to maximize its own profit, so we developed a
novel bidding strategy for cloud CDA, BH-strategy, which is a two-stage game
bidding strategy. At last we designed three simulation scenarios to compare the
performance of our strategy with other dominating bidding strategies and proved
that BH-strategy has better performance on surpluses, successful transactions
and market efficiency. In addition, we discussed that our cloud CDA mechanism
is feasible for cloud computing resource allocation.
