Arushi Dogra received her MS Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Her research work was supervised by Dr. Suresh Purini. Here’s a summary of her research work on A Study of Multi-Cloud Marketplace Model using Cooperative and Non-cooperative Game Theoretic Frameworks:
In the first part of this thesis, we analyze a multi-cloud marketplace model consisting of brokers with multi-unit demands and cloud providers with multi-unit supplies. Using tools from cooperative game theory we show the existence of a core allocation which also maximizes the market surplus. We do this by finding an optimal coalition structure and formulate an integer linear programming problem to maximize the overall market surplus. The optimal coalition lies in the core which gives it stability and no incentive to deviate to any other sub-coalition. We then study our model in the real-world scenario in which the brokers don’t reveal their valuations for the cloud providers. For this, we use the auction algorithm due to Bertsekas [2] which leads to a core allocation without requiring the brokers to reveal their utilities.
In the second part of this thesis, we study how an oligopolist influences the coalition structure in federated cloud markets. We consider two price offering strategies for an oligopolist: non-adaptive and adaptive. In the non-adaptive strategy, an oligopolist makes a price offer to all the cloud providers simultaneously.
It can be noted that the oligopolist can buy-out all the cloud providers by making a price offer which is equal to a core allocation and the total price offer made by the oligopolist is equal to the value of the grand coalition. In the adaptive strategy, the oligopolist approaches the cloud providers one after another in a sequential manner. We show that by using the adaptive strategy, the oligopolist can buy-out all the cloud providers at a total price offer which is less than that of the non-adaptive strategy.