A QoS-aware virtual resource pricing service based on game theory in federated clouds

Recently, federated cloud platform has become a promising paradigm to provide cloud services for various kinds of users in a distributed manner. To compete for cloud users, it is critically important for each cloud provider to select an optimal price that best corresponds to their service qualities as well as remains attractive to cloud users. In this paper, we first formulate the pricing strategy of individual cloud provider as a constrained optimisation programming problem to analyse the behaviours of both cloud users and cloud providers. Then, we present game-based model which introduces a set of virtual resource agents to help providers adjusting their prices with aiming at achieving a global optimal solution. Theoretical analysis is present to prove the validity and effectiveness of the proposed game model, and extensive experiments are conducted in a real-world cloud platform to evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that the proposed pricing model can significantly improve the resource revenue for cloud providers and provide desirable quality-of-service (QoS) for user tasks in terms of various performance metrics.