Cooperative Game-Based Virtual Machine Resource Allocation Algorithms in Cloud Data Centers

With the growing demand of cloud services, cloud data centers (CDCs) can provide flexible resource provisioning in order to accommodate the workload demand. In CDCs, the virtual machine (VM) resource allocation problem is an important and challenging issue to provide efficient infrastructure services. In this paper, we propose a unified resource allocation scheme for VMs in the CDC system. To provide a fair-efficient solution, we concentrate on the basic concept of Shapley value and adopt its variations to effectively allocate CDC resources. Based on the characteristics of value solutions, we develop novel CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth resource allocation algorithms. To practically implement our algorithms, application types are assumed as cooperative game players, and different value solutions are applied to optimize the resource utilization. Therefore, our four resource allocation algorithms are jointly combined as a novel fourfold game model and take various benefits in a rational way through the cascade interactions while solving comprehensively some control issues. To ensure the growing demand of cloud services, this feature can leverage the full synergy of different value solutions. To check the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed scheme, we conduct extensive simulations. The simulation results show that our algorithms have significant performance improvement compared to the existing state-of-the-art protocols. Finally, we summarize our cooperative game-based approach and discuss possible major research issues for the future challenges about the cloud-assisted DC resource allocation paradigm