Abstract:
Cloud federation is an architecture that allows cloud providers to make use of their
unallocated virtual machines, by combining their resources to serve a pool of cloud
consumers whose requests cannot be handled by any of these providers alone. A client
is willing to rent computing resources from the cloud providers or federations due to
the advantages they can provide. The quality of service (QoS) is one of the main factors
that attracts or discourages the clients from renting such services. What complicates
the process is having the actual QoS delivered being worse than the promised QoS.
Such could lead to the client changing federation, and the latter getting dissociated.
Some of the main reasons that could result in worsening the QoS are encountering
passive malicious cloud providers after the federation formation, and having unstable
federation formation. In this thesis, we present solutions for such problems in order
to increase the lifespan of the formed federations, by introducing a maximin game to
prevent the malicious providers from accomplishing their wicked schemes without getting
penalized, and advancing a genetic and an evolutionary game theoretical models
for the federation formation process to bypass the dynamicity boundaries. Experiments
conducted using CloudHarmony real-world dataset revealed that both of our solutions
were able to increase the total profit obtained by the federations and ameliorate the
QoS delivered, granting the cloud consumer a great experience with the service.
