Price and QoS competition in cloud market by using cellular learning automata

Recently cloud computing has gained enormous attention in the industry with an increasing number of cloud service providers. Their tendency to cloud computing is of benefit for cloud users, as the increasing number of cloud providers results in a competitive market for attracting and satisfying new and current cloud users. In this paper, price and quality of service (QoS) competition in an oligopoly cloud market is presented. To do so, nature of a non-cooperating competition in an oligopoly cloud market is characterized to understand how the cloud providers select optimum prices, without knowledge of decisions made by cloud users. An M/M/c queue is used to model the cloud provider and a utility function is defined for cloud users regarding their requirements. Competition for finding optimal prices was modeled by using cloud providers as cells of CLA and applying CALA in each cell for learning pricing behavior. Finally, the effect of model parameters is investigated.