MultiCloud Tournament: A cloud federation approach to prevent Free-Riders by encouraging resource sharing

Organized in associations, Cloud Computing Providers became able to negotiate the acquisition of resources from other providers at more attractive prices, while allowing the marketing of their own idle resources to the other members of the respective Inter-Cloud. However, Inter-Cloud associations are characterized as resource-sharing environments, which allow for the presence of malicious providers called Free-Riders. Free-Riders have predatory behavior, seeking to serve only their own interests and consequently harming other providers within the environment. Mechanisms to avoid Free-Riders, as well as to keep resources supply × demand balanced, are needed in Inter-cloud environments such as Cloud Federations. For example, the absence of a resource consumption control mechanism can cause a Free-Rider to consume resources in a way that is disproportionate to that offered to Inter-Cloud, referring to the problem described previously. In view of the above, this paper presents a new Inter-Cloud called MultiClouds Tournament (MCT) focused on addressing the standalone cloud providers limitations. This Inter-Cloud is inspired by the format of a soccer tournament and based on the main features of Cloud Federations. We assessed the MCT using a real workload, showing it offers an architecture that adds to the characteristics of the federations, being effective in the management of CSPs and robust in relation to Free-Riders prevention and the main strategies CSPs.