An Innovative Mechanism for Optimal Profit of Cloud Supplier and Its Users

Abstract

To design a service mechanism for profit optimizations of both a cloud provider and its
multiple users. We consider the problem from a game theoretic perspective and
characterize the relationship between the cloud provider and its multiple users as a
Stackelberg game, in which the strategies of all users are subject to that of the cloud
provider. The cloud provider tries to select and provision appropriate servers and
configure a proper request allocation strategy to reduce energy cost while satisfying its
cloud users at the same time. We approximate its server’s selection space by adding a
controlling parameter and configure an optimal request allocation strategy. For each user,
we design a utility function which combines the net profit with time efficiency and try to
maximize its value under the strategy of the cloud provider. We formulate the
competitions among all users as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem (GNEP). We
solve the problem by employing variational inequality (VI) theory and prove that there
exists a generalized Nash equilibrium solution set for the formulated GNEP. Finally, we
propose an iterative algorithm (IA), which characterizes the whole process of our
proposed service mechanism. We conduct some numerical calculations to verify our
theoretical analyses. The experimental results show that our IA algorithm can benefit both
of a cloud provider and its multiple users by configuring proper strategies.