An efficient trust-based Game-Theoretic approach for Cloud Federation Formation

Cloud Federation or a Coalition of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) is a hot topic nowadays in the industry as well as academia. Cloud Federation was introduced to overcome the realistic limited amount of resources available from a single CSP so that the CSPs may not lose its customers due to the unavailability of resources. But its a challenge to form a Cloud Federation which is stable, reliable and fair in terms of payoff to the CSPs that are part of the Cloud Federation. In this paper, we propose to find a solution to the Cloud Federation formation by following a game-theoretic approach considering the trust between the participating CSPs. This technique will also allow the CSPs to take decision unilaterally based on their own decisions depending on the profit they would receive upon inclusion into the federation. Our approach takes into consideration the trust between the CSPs taking part in the Cloud Federation Formation process. The Game-Theoretic approach used in our approach makes use of a simple Cloud Federation Formation policy which ensures stability and fairness in the Cloud Federation.