Abstract: Pricing mechanism is a key factor influencing the interests of cloud users and profits of cloud service providers. Three different pricing mechanisms of IaaS cloud service are compared in terms of service provider’s benefits. Firstly, IaaS cloud service pricing mechanism is divided into two major categories: fixed pricing including pay-per-use pricing and subscription pricing and dynamic pricing, and theoretically analyzes IaaS service provider’s benefits within fix pricing and dynamic pricing. Secondly, the revenue models of pay-per-use and subscription pricing are built, and a heuristic algorithm is brought forward to construct the revenue model of dynamic pricing mechanism. Thirdly, the revenue model of the three pricing mechanism is implemented in Repast Simphony environment. The results show that as the length of service and the number of customers increased, dynamic pricing mechanism can create more revenue for IaaS cloud service provider, meanwhile the IaaS cloud service provider can change parameters such as service level and resource prices to influence customer behavior, so that the number of customer increased, thereby the revenue increased.

Key words: cloud computing, IaaS, service pricing, heuristic algorithm, multi-agent simulation