Comparison of Cloud Federation Models with Selfish Cloud Service Providers

With the advent of Cloud Computing and its ever growing role in today's IT marketplace, Cloud Federation has recently emerged as a new frontier to be tackled by researchers so as to enable opaque resource sharing and cooperation between separate (public or private) clouds. Current federation models, which are based on either centralized or P2P methods, can be violated by the natural selfish behavior of cloud service providers, and no clear consensus exists as to which models perform more efficiently under different situations. In this paper, alongside introducing a new weighted P2P method, we use mathematical models to capture the behavior of different federation mechanisms based on each method, taking into consideration how the selfish behavior of cloud service providers might violate the federation mechanism. Our goal is to show how each model behaves under these violations and how they compare based on obtained individual profits and overall federation efficiency. Our results show that these three cloud federation methods, whilst providing the same amount of social welfare, counter the aforementioned violations differently and that individual cloud profits, whilst comparable, are in correlation with different federation scenarios.