Optimal Cloud Resource Scheduling in Smart Grid: A Hierarchical Game Approach

The problem of cloud resource scheduling in smart grid is one of the hot spots in recent years. Different from most existing studies that focus on the scenario with a single service provider, this paper studies cloud resource scheduling with multiple service providers and multiple residential users. The users in this scenario can make service selection dynamically according to the service price. In turn, the price of the service providers' resource is affected by the users' selection. The interactive decision problem between the users and the service providers is modeled as a hierarchical game. At the lower-level, we use the evolutionary game to simulate the service selection of residential users. At the upper-level, non-cooperative game is used to simulate the competition among service providers. Then, we prove that the upper and lower level can reach the Nash equilibrium and the evolutionary equilibrium, respectively. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical game based cloud resource scheduling algorithm (HCRSA) for the proposed game framework. Simulation results show that both the upper and lower level can converge to their equilibrium after a few iterations. Compared with traditional resource scheduling method, the proposed HCRSA algorithm effectively reduces users' payment and reaches a balance between supply and demand.