A pricing approach for optimal use of computing resources in cloud federation

Cloud federation is the place where the cloud service providers could supply their resource deficiency from other members and offer their extra resources to other members of the federation in case of necessity. From the viewpoint of maximum use of resources, resource pricing is one of the main challenges in cloud computing which affects the utilization of resources and is one of the methods of resource management. As far as pricing is effective on the service providers' profit, the appropriate pricing method will create proper profit for the providers in the federation and lead to optimum use of resources. In addition, the welfare of service providers will also increase, and the Quality of Services (QoS) in the federation will be enhanced. In the present study, first, we provide a method based on linear programming for the distribution of requests between members of the federation; then inspired by the concepts of macroeconomic, we explain a model for the evaluation of cloud service providers and provide a meta-heuristic algorithm for service pricing. The proposed algorithm utilizes the results of the evaluation to offer prices to the service providers and provides the best price based on the results of the evaluation to the cloud service providers to maximize their profit. In addition, the proposed algorithm manages the number of shared resources of providers in proportionate to the requests and price. Finally, a set of tests will be performed on the introduced system.