Pricing Mechanisms for Fair Bills and Profitable Revenue Share in Cloud Federation

Abstract

Cloud Federation is the coalition of multiple Cloud Providers (CPs) to surmount the constraint of finite physical resources of individual CPs. The collaboration enables them to share resources with each other at a certain price based on Federation Level Agreement (FLA). The pricing mechanism used for the resources requested by customer’s acts as an important factor in the calculation of their bills and in the generation of revenues for CPs, in such an environment. Consequently, it performs a key role in the selection of a CP by customers and in incentivizing the CPs to remain in Federation. Considering this, the present paper aims to propose mechanisms of pricing to charge internal users and peer CPs. The proposed mechanisms are evaluated in a simulated environment. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed pricing mechanisms ensure fair bills for customers and profitable share of revenues for the collaborating CPs.