Abstract:
An InterCloud is an interconnected global “cloud of clouds” that enables each cloud to tap into resources of other clouds. This is the earliest work to devise an agent-ba...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
An InterCloud is an interconnected global “cloud of clouds” that enables each cloud to tap into resources of other clouds. This is the earliest work to devise an agent-based InterCloud economic model for analyzing consumer-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud interactions. While economic encounters between consumers and cloud providers are modeled as a many-to-many negotiation, economic encounters among clouds are modeled as a coalition game. To bolster many-to-many consumer-to-cloud negotiations, this work devises a novel interaction protocol and a novel negotiation strategy that is characterized by both 1) adaptive concession rate (ACR) and 2) minimally sufficient concession (MSC). Mathematical proofs show that agents adopting the ACR-MSC strategy negotiate optimally because they make minimum amounts of concession. By automatically controlling concession rates, empirical results show that the ACR-MSC strategy is efficient because it achieves significantly higher utilities than the fixed-concession-rate time-dependent strategy. To facilitate the formation of InterCloud coalitions, this work devises a novel four-stage cloud-to-cloud interaction protocol and a set of novel strategies for InterCloud agents. Mathematical proofs show that these InterCloud coalition formation strategies 1) converge to a subgame perfect equilibrium and 2) result in every cloud agent in an InterCloud coalition receiving a payoff that is equal to its Shapley value.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing ( Volume: 3, Issue: 3, 01 July-Sept. 2015)