A Game Theoretic Approach to Estimate Fair Cost of VM Placement in Cloud Data Center

Pricing of virtual machines (VMs) with different dimensions is a challenging task. VM pricing involves both capital and operational expenditures. Capital expenditure is fixed in nature, while operational expenditure is variable. A fraction of capital expenditure is included for VM pricing. An individual pays the cloud service provider (CSP) for his requested VM. If the users cooperate among themselves they may end up paying less to CSP for their requested VMs vis-a-vis they would have paid had they requested individually. In this paper, an n-person cooperative game is adopted to determine the price that users would pay for their requested VMs under a cooperative environment. Shapley value is used to estimate the fraction of capital expenditure that would be included in the VM price. An integer linear programming is proposed for energy-efficient placement. For evaluation, VM configurations and pricing of popular CSPs-Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2-are considered. Results show that users would pay less for their requested VMs if they cooperate. The energy consumed by the proposed VM placement technique is compared with first fit decreasing (FFD) and enhanced first fit decreasing (EFFD). It is observed that the proposed technique consumes lesser energy compared to FFD and EFFD.