Generalized Nash Equilibrium Model of the Service Provisioning Problem in Multi-Cloud Competitions

Abstract

With the development of cloud computing, heterogeneous service providers can publish services in the cloud market under the multi-cloud environment. As the cloud market expands, the relationship between service providers and users is changing. Users as rational individuals are no longer limited to choosing a single service provider, but observe the dynamic changes of services in the multi-cloud service market and choose services with better utilities; service providers need to consider the service selected situation in the market, and adjust service providing strategies to win the market share competition. It has been a great challenge for multi-cloud service providers to develop an effective service provisioning strategy according to the service changing utilities, user's service choice behavior, etc. This paper uses a non-cooperative game theory to study this service provisioning problem in multi-cloud competitions. The contributions are: (1) referring to the market economic theory, the changes of the service quality are added to the user choice model and described the influence to the multi-cloud competitions; (2) using the game theory, the problem is transformed into the GNEP (Generalized Nash Equilibrium Problem); (3) The existence of the GNE (Generalized Nash Equilibrium) solution is proved and an algorithm is proposed for providers to obtain the best market share and make the provisioning strategy. At last, we conduct simulation experiments on Matlab. The results show that the GNE method can improve the cloud service market share of providers and help providers propose effective service provisioning strategies.