A business-oriented Cloud federation model for real-time applications

Cloud federation can allow individual Cloud providers working collaboratively to offer best-effort services to service customers. However, the current federated Cloud computing model is not appropriate for computationally intensive Real-time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). This paper discusses how we propose and develop a business-oriented federated Cloud computing model where multiple independent infrastructure providers can cooperate seamlessly to provide scalable IT infrastructure and QoS-assured hosting services for ROIA. The distinct features of this proposed Cloud federation model is its business layer that can provide an enhanced security features and can trigger the on-demand resource provisioning across multiple infrastructure providers, hence helping to maximize the customer satisfaction, business benefits and resources usage. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.