Distributed Resource Allocation Games in Horizontal Dynamic Cloud Federation Platform

Distributed resource allocation is a very important and complex problem in emerging horizontal dynamic cloud federation (HDCF) platform. The HDCF platform differs from the existing vertical supply chain federation (VSCF) models in terms of establishing federation and dynamic pricing. There is a need to develop algorithms that can capture this complexity yet can be easily implemented and used to solve distributed resource allocation problem in HDCF platform. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic solution to this problem that ensures mutual benefits so that the cloud providers (CPs) are encouraged to form a HDCF platform. We study two resource allocation games - cooperative and non-cooperative games to analyze interaction among CPs in a HDCF environment. Also both centralized and distributed algorithms are presented to find optimal solutions which have low overhead and robust performance. Various simulations were carried out to validate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation games.