A game theory based resource sharing scheme in cloud computing environment

Cloud federation has been proposed as a new paradigm that allows providers to avoid the limitation of owning only restricted amount of resources. Multiple cloud providers can cooperate to establish a cloud federation to support both internal users and public cloud users. Federation enhances providers´ ability to serve for public cloud users. As a result of cooperation, cloud providers in federation can gain more profit. There is a need to develop a way that how cloud providers can form a federation and how to solve the problem of resource and revenue sharing. In this paper, we study the cooperative behavior of multiple cloud providers with different resources. We propose a game theoretic policy that helps cloud providers in the decision-making process to form coalition to increase resources utilization and profit. We also present the simple model of resource and revenue sharing with coalition formation. The cloud provider and coalition´s cooperative utility forms are developed. To obtain the solution, we develop the stochastic linear programming game model which takes the uncertainty of internal users from each provider into account. Based on coalitional game we analyze the stability of the coalition formation among cloud providers. The simulation results indicate that the game theoretic coalition can lead to better computing resource utilization and higher profit.