Federation and Revenue Sharing in Cloud Computing Environment

In Cloud computing, resources such as CPU, RAM, and disk etc. are provided as a service via the Internet. Elasticity is a key feature of Cloud Computing. It aims to enabling a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to negotiate the possibility to borrow external resources from other CSPs when its own facilities are not able to satisfy a client request. Reciprocally, a CSP may sell some of its unused resources to another CSP in case of under load. Today, Cloud Federation is a key approach considered for Cloud elasticity. In the context of the Easi-Clouds European ITEA 2 research project, we aim to develop Pricing-as-a-Service (PraaS) suited to the Federated Cloud environment. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a state of the art of the pricing and revenue sharing models in federated environment. We discuss the specifications of Cloud Federation as well as its different drivers and barriers. Three types of pricing strategies (on-demand, spot and reserved) are presented. In the second part, we present the problem of revenue sharing in the federation with some properties we are willing to fulfill. We propose and evaluate our revenue sharing model suited to the Federated environment with numerical analysis via simulation. We compare our approach to the proportional share and the Shapley value method. Finally, we provide and analyze the results of our simulations with our conclusion and perspectives.