Game theoretic modeling of cooperation among service providers in mobile cloud computing environments

Mobile cloud computing aims at improving the performance of mobile applications and to enhance the resource utilization of service providers. In this paper, we consider a mobile cloud computing environment in which the service providers can form a coalition to create a resource pool to support the mobile applications. First, an admission control mechanism is used to provide services of mobile applications to the users given the available long-term reserved resources in a pool. An optimization formulation is introduced to obtain the optimal decision of admission control. Then, for a given coalition of service providers, the revenue obtained from utilizing the resource pool has to be shared among the service providers. A coalitional game model is developed for sharing the revenue. In addition, since the service providers can decide on short-term capacity expansion of the resource pool, a game model is introduced to obtain the optimal strategies of service providers on capacity expansion such that their profits are maximized.