A coalitional game based mechanism for resource sharing in geo-distributed mobile cloud computing

Geo-distributed mobile cloud computing takes location information into consideration in mobile cloud computing. Users can access cloud resources that are geographically close to their mobile devices in Geo-distributed mobile cloud computing to reduce communication delay. Considering the uncertainty requirement of mobile users, in this paper, we focus on resource sharing through cooperation among cloud providers. A coalitional game based mechanism is proposed for resource sharing to optimize the resources usage and reduce the cost of cloud service providers. The coalition game is adopted to form the coalition of cloud service providers and the stability of its structure is guaranteed. The cost distribution of resource usage by cloud service providers participating in coalition game is analyzed according to Shapley value method. Besides, the coalition resource sharing problem is transformed into the problem of resource cost minimization in the coalition, and the solution is obtained by the dual decomposition and the subgradient method. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.