Conceptual model of brokering and authentication in cloud federations

The concept of cloud federations recently attracted the focus of attention of the research community. Cloud federations allow cloud providers to cooperate through the integration of their services. There are two important issues that must be dealt with in a federated environment. First, it must be defined how resources will be shared and made available to users. The other issue concerns user management and authentication within the federation. This paper presents a conceptual model for federation brokerage, in which a global agent searches for resources and allocates them to users in a cloud federation. The proposed model also defines authentication mechanisms that allow user recognition across different cloud domains.