A Stackelberg Game Approach toward Migration of Enterprise Applications to the Cloud

With the development of cloud computing, more and more cloud resources are rented or purchased by users. Using an economics approach to achieve cloud resource management has been thought of as a good choice for an enterprise user to complete an application's migration and deployment into the public cloud. During an application's migration process, it is important but very challenging to achieve the satisfaction of both the enterprise user and the public cloud provider at the same time. In this paper, we apply an economics approach to investigate the migration optimization problem during the migration process of applications from the enterprise user's data center to the remote public cloud. We consider the application migration time of the enterprise user and the energy consumption of physical machines, and establish a single static round optimization problem for both the enterprise user and the cloud provider on the premise of satisfying the quality of experience (QoE) based on the Stackelberg game, where the public cloud provider is leader and the enterprise user is follower. Then we propose a novel algorithm to find the optimal physical machine placement for application migration. After that, we further consider that an enterprise user needs to migrate several applications, and extend the single-round static game to the multi-round dynamic game, where the energy consumption costs of the physical machines are reduced by adjusting the states of the physical machines in each round. We finally illustrate the performance of our scheme through some simulation results.</p>