An overlapping coalition formation approach to maximize payoffs in cloud computing environment

Data-intensive applications are anticipated to increase day by day. The amount of computing and storage resources required by these are also increasing simultaneously, creating high demands for cloud resources. Cloud provider's limited resources are not adequate to meet the elastic demand of consumers. Cloud coalition is the key approach to deal with such elastic demand of resources in the environment. But traditional coalition formation mechanism allows a cloud provider to participate into a single coalition which leads to under-utilize of coalition resources with increasing security risk like botnet attacks. In this paper, a mathematical framework from cooperative game namely overlapping coalition formation (OCF) game to overcome the under-utilization problem and to reduce security risk for cloud providers (CPs) is introduced by permitting a CP to participate into multiple small coalitions. First, the concepts of OCF game in cloud is presented and then, an algorithm for the stability in OCF game is introduced. We analyze the performance of the proposed approach with traditional coalition formation and no-coalition scenarios in perspective of payoffs, yielding higher payoffs for the participating CPs.