Cloud Federation Formation in Oligopolistic Markets
In this paper, we study how an oligopolist influences the coalition structure in federated cloud markets. Specifically, we use cooperative game theory to model the circumstances under which a cloud provider prefers to join a cloud federation vis-a-vis consider taking a price offer made by an oligopolist.
A multi-cloud marketplace model with multiple brokers for IaaS layer and generalized stable matching
In this paper, we propose a multi-cloud marketplace model for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer with multiple cloud providers, intermediate brokers and end users. The brokers service end users subscribed to them by aggregating resources (virtual machines) from cloud providers while maximizing their profits. Similarly cloud providers (producers) allocate their supply of virtual machines to brokers (consumers) so as to maximize their profits. We define the notion of social welfare in this market structure and study two trading schemes. The first scheme involves centralized control which aims at maximizing social welfare but may contain unstable producer-consumer pairs who have an incentive to deviate from the current allocation. The second scheme eliminates such unstable pairs by using a generalization of stable matching algorithm but may lead to sub-optimal social welfare. The stable matching algorithm we proposed in this paper is a particular way of generalizing the original Gale-Shapley algorithm.
Pricing strategies of an oligopolist in federated cloud markets
In this paper, we study how an oligopolist influences the coalition structure in federated cloud markets. Specifically, we use cooperative game theory to model the circumstances under which a cloud provider prefers to join a cloud federation vis-a-vis consider taking a price offer made by an oligopolist. We consider two price offering strategies for an oligopolist: non-adaptive and adaptive. In non-adaptive strategy, an oligopolist makes a price offer to all the cloud providers simultaneously. It can be noted that the oligopolist can buy-out all the cloud providers by making a price offer which is equal to a core allocation and the total price offer made by the oligopolist is equal to the value of the grand coalition. In adaptive strategy, the oligopolist approaches the cloud providers one after another in a sequential manner. We show that by using the adaptive strategy, the oligopolist can buy-out all the cloud providers at a total price offer which is less than that of the non-adaptive strategy.