Reliability-based Formation of Cloud Federations Using Game Theory

Cloud federation is one form of the cloud computing model that supports numerous types of applications through collaboration between different service providers. Cloud federation enables providers to offer more efficient services to customers by sharing their computing and storage resources. However, the reliability of cloud can he degraded if the federation is formed and executed in an unreliable fashion. In this paper, we propose a reliability-based cloud federation model. We evaluate the reliability of different service providers using our evaluation approach and then model the federation process as a hedonic coalition formation game based on a reliability-driven utility function. Our proposed federation formation algorithm enables service providers to cooperate while considering the reliability of the infrastructure and refrain from cooperating with unreliable systems. Our evaluation shows that the providers will be able to form acceptable federations through our algorithm while preserving or enhancing the reliability of their services in a reasonable amount of time.