Stressed web environments as strategic games: Risk profiles and weltanschauung

Abstract

We consider the behaviour of a set of services in a stressed web environment where performance patterns may be difficult to predict. In stressed environments the performances of some providers may degrade while the performances of others, with elastic resources, may improve. The allocation of web-based providers to users (brokering) is modelled by a strategic non-cooperative angel-daemon game with risk profiles. A risk profile specifies a bound on the number of unreliable service providers within an environment without identifying the names of these providers. Risk profiles offer a means of analysing the behaviour of broker agents which allocate service providers to users. A Nash equilibrium is a fixed point of such a game in which no user can locally improve their choice of provider-thus, a Nash equilibrium is a viable solution to the provider/user allocation problem. Angel daemon games provide a means of reasoning about stressed environments and offer the possibility of designing brokers using risk profiles and Nash equilibria. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.