A Many-to-Many Demand and Response Hybrid Game Method for Cloud Environments

In this article, we design a service mechanism for profits optimization between multiple cloud providers and multiple cloud customers (many-to-many). We explore this problem from the perspective of game theory but take a different approach compared with existing cloud resource pricing game methods. First, we regard the relationships among multiple cloud customers as an evolutionary game, and formulate the competitions among the multiple cloud providers as a noncooperative game. Eventually, we form a hybrid game model in which the strategy of each customer and each cloud provider is affected not only by the other side but also by customers or cloud providers other than themselves. Second, based on the hybrid game model, we simulate the bargaining process between cloud providers and customers by controlling supply and demand allocation, and try to ultimately achieve a balanced supply and demand state, i.e., a win-win situation. For each cloud customer and provider, we design a utility function. A customer’s utility involves net profits and the cloud providers’ bidding strategies, and a cloud provider’s utility involves net profits and the cloud customers’ demand strategies. Both sides attempt to maximize their own profits under the influences of each other. We prove that our proposed strategies enable each of the two games to converge to their own equilibrium. Finally, the strategies of cloud customers and providers can be implemented through an iterative proximal algorithm ($\mathcal {IPA}$) and a distributed iterative algorithm ($\mathcal {DIA}$). The experimental results validate our methods and show that the proposed method can benefit both multiple cloud providers and customers.