Analysis Method of the JointCloud Resource Market: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Driven by the globalization of the economy, the globalized economy is experiencing a new evolution that advocates cooperation among multiple potential competing entities rather than monopolization. JointCloud has been envisioned as a promising approach to enhance cross-cloud cooperation and exploit the price heterogeneity to reduce cloud computing costs. Considering the data produced by the working process of the JointCloud environment, the data of users and the results of users’ different tasks can also be traded or processed. We consider a kind of hybrid resource in the JointCloud market, where not only traditional cloud resources but also data resources are considered. Depending on privacy and data ownership, data resources can be processed by others clouds to make more profit. Under this circumstance, we investigate the problem of resource management under the JointCloud environment wherein multiple clouds sell their resources to other clouds and consumers through a wholesale market. As resources can be sold to either clouds or consumers, we formulate the market of resources in JointCloud as a supply chain network competition model with multiple competing manufacturers and retailers offering resources. A market game is established to model the competition among clouds. We theoretically prove that the formulated market game has a Nash equilibrium. We also analyse the profit of manufacturers and retailers when a new cloud enters the JointCloud. The analysis explains the reason for the emergency of the JointCloud.