Abstract
A federation of cloud providers (CPs) consists of a set of self-interested CPs that cooperate in order to provide virtual machine (VM) resources requested by users. The CPs by virtue of being part of a federation can make some profit by selling their unused VM capacity. This paper presents an efficient mechanism of resource and revenue sharing in a cloud federation that motivates the CPs to cooperate. The proposed mechanism models the interactions among the CPs in a federation as a coalition game. In contrast to existing approaches, the game model aims at maximizing the social welfare or total profit of the CPs in a federation to promote their long-term individual profit. In addition, we present a comprehensive analysis of the related costs and revenue associated with the various decisions of the CPs related to their joining in a federation. Various simulations were carried out to validate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative capacity sharing mechanism. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed mechanism can satisfy the fairness and stability properties, maximize the social welfare the CPs in a federation and achieve cost effective resource sharing.