A Game Theoretic Approach to Service Discovery and Selection

The concept of cloud computing is changing the way that many industries conduct their businesses. In some industries, distributed resources are clustered together to form a cloud of services. Clients can establish business relationship with the service providers in a service cloud. In practice, businesses would like to build long term and stable business relationship with their business partners. In game theory, it is well known that, to build a stable relationship, both partners must benefit from the relationship. This paper proposed a game theoretic approach to solve the service selection problem. The scheme builds a custom reach ability game according to the business workflows and the business preferences of the client and the service provider. If a solution can be found in the game, it means (a) the functional requirements of the client is satisfied by the service provider, and (b) the business preferences of the client and the service provider can both be satisfied. That is, the client and the service provider can form a stable business relationship.