Modelling Cloud Federation: A Fair Profit Distribution Strategy Using the Shapley Value

Cloud computing provides software (Software as a Service), platform (Platform as a Service) and infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service) services to its users by integrating IT resources into a large-scale and scalable resource pool through the virtualisation technology. However, the single cloud resource provider model currently implemented by many providers may fail short to meet the dynamic nature of cloud users' requirements. Cloud federation can mitigate this issue by optimising cloud resource allocation through sharing and re-usability of available resources. This paper revisit the problem of cloud engineering by tackling the key issue of the fair distribution of profit between cloud resource providers, which, to the best of our knowledge, has only been scarcely addressed by the research and practitioners' community. We propose a method that enables the cloud federation to map the contribution of resources of the participants to the federations into a quality of service metric used to achieve a cloud federation. Building upon a federation game implementation, we reveal the possibilities and benefits of different federation compositions using the Shapley value of each resource provider as a way of implementing a fair profit sharing strategy. Using extensions of the CloudSim package, we present simulation results that demonstrate the fairness of our proposed method and strategy.