A Two-Phase Gaming Model for Resource Pricing in Elastic Cloud Environments

With the development of cloud computing, many organizations are deploying their IT infrastructures through cloud platforms so as to provide services for more and more users. Therefore, resource pricing mechanism becomes a key component in these open cloud platforms. In this paper, we propose a gaming theory based cloud resource pricing model, in which a cooperative gaming model is applied to optimize the resource benefits and noncooperative gaming model is used to balance the user’s costs and provider’s benefits. Theoretical analysis is presented to validate the correctness of the proposed gaming model, and extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed resource pricing mechanism. The results indicate that our resource pricing mechanism outperforms many existing approaches in terms of resource profits and response time, especially when the cloud system is in presence of intensive workloads.