Broker Emergence in Social Clouds

Cloud computing generally involves the use of data storage and computational resources from external providers. Although a number of commercial providers are currently on the market, it is often beneficial for a user to consider capability from a number of different ones. This would prevent vendor lock-in and more economic choice for a user. Based on this observation, work on "Social Clouds" has involved using social relationships formed between individuals and institutions to establish Peer-2-Peer resource sharing networks, enabling market forces to determine how demand for resources can be met by a number of different (often individually owned) providers. In this paper we identify how trading within such a network could be enhanced by the dynamic emergence (or identification) of brokers -- based on their social position in the network (based on connectivity metrics within a social network). We investigate how offering financial incentives to such brokers, once discovered, could help improve the number of trades that could take place with a network. A social score algorithm is described and simulated with PeerSim to validate our approach. We also compare the approach to a distributed dominating set algorithm - the closest approximation to our approach.