Agent-Based Interactions and Economic Encounters in an Intelligent InterCloud

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.