Towards a fairer benefit distribution in grid environments

The emergence of new grid services requires the definition of suited business models taking into account the expectations of both end-users and resource providers. Basically, such business models consider the problem of computing, storage and network resources virtualization. The optimization of resource utilization may be carried out either in discrete time or in continuous time. In previous works, we proposed a discrete time approach enabling a better utilization of both network and computing resources in the context of layer-2 virtual private networks (VPN). In this paper, we extend this analysis by integrating to our model a new grid entity, namely the grid resource broker (GRB) as a middleware entity between end-users and resource providers. We compare the economic gain of both the GRB and resource providers via several criteria for three different pricing strategies. In addition, we define the best adopted pricing strategy to the GRB and study its impact on resource providers.