Pricing-Driven Resource Allocation in the Computing Continuum

2026-04-14

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of resource allocation in geographically distributed and heterogeneous continuum computing infrastructures, where combinatorial explosion and limited generalization hinder effective deployment. To tackle this, the study introduces, for the first time, the pricing structures commonly found in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystems into the resource allocation problem, formulating a unified, price-based representation of the configuration space. The authors propose PRIME, a pricing-aware analysis engine that efficiently searches for cost-optimal deployment configurations satisfying both functional and non-functional constraints. Leveraging synthetic infrastructure topologies and workload generation techniques, the project constructs a comprehensive dataset comprising 9,600 diverse scenarios, demonstrating that the proposed approach achieves both scalability and computational efficiency in complex, heterogeneous environments.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Deploying applications across the computing continuum requires selecting infrastructure nodes from geographically distributed and heterogeneous environments while satisfying constraints (e.g., performance, location). This decision problem is an important facet of resource allocation. As infrastructures grow in scale and heterogeneity, the resulting decision space becomes inherently combinatorial. Existing approaches typically formulate this problem as a constrained optimization task using ad-hoc representations of infrastructure topologies and demand, which hinders generalization across solutions. In contrast, Software as a Service ecosystems address a structurally similar configuration problem through pricings -structures whose plans and add-ons implicitly define the configuration space of possible subscriptions. Building on this observation, this work explores the potential of pricings as general-purpose representations of configuration spaces, positioning them as a promising alternative for addressing configuration problems, such as resource allocation, across the computing continuum. To this end, the paper presents the following contributions: i) a pricing-based formulation of the resource allocation problem in the computing continuum, enabling infrastructure configuration spaces to be represented using pricings; ii) a workflow that leverages PRIME, a pricing analysis engine, to explore these spaces and compute cost-optimal deployments satisfying functional and non-functional constraints; iii) generation processes for synthetic infrastructure topologies and workload demands; and iv) a dataset comprising 9,600 precomputed resource allocation scenarios to support benchmarking.

Problem

• resource allocation
• computing continuum
• pricing
• configuration space
• heterogeneous infrastructure

Innovation

• pricing-based resource allocation
• computing continuum
• configuration space representation
• PRIME
• infrastructure topology