Fairness in revenue sharing for stable cloud federations

Abstract

A cloud federation is a platform, on which a number of cloud service providers (CSPs) builds an alliance and cooperates to share cloud resources. It is an appropriate way to address cloud elasticity needs. It expands resources beyond the limited capacity of a single CSP. It also helps maximizing profit for any CSP by improving the utilization of their resources. An alliance can be formed, only if potential members (CSPs) see marginal benefits in joining a federation. Once the alliance is formed, a fair distribution of revenue among the members of the alliance becomes important for the alliance to sustain. The distribution can be proportional to the contribution to the alliance. This paper analyzes the Shapley value method as a revenue sharing model for cloud federations. Our simulation results of the model show that the model increases the revenue for the federation due to the aggregation of spare capacity. The model provides a fair distribution of the revenue to the members of the federation, improving the stability of cloud federations.