Enhancing fairness in P2P cloud federations

This work presents a non-monetary market system mechanism for resource sharing within a decentralized lightweight Peer-to-Peer (P2P) federation of private cloud providers. The mechanism is intended to enable collaborative peers to take appropriate decisions guaranteeing suitable levels of satisfaction and fairness as well as isolation of non-collaborative peers. The proposed scheme leverages the notion of the Network of Favors, formerly advanced as an incentive mechanism for P2P opportunistic desktop grids in which peers are concerned primarily with their satisfaction, not fairness. An enhancement of the Network of Favors is presented here that consists in the introduction of a control loop mechanism limiting the amount of resources that a private cloud is willing to provide to other members of federation, thereby indirectly keeping resource contention at an adequate level for discouraging free riding and guaranteeing an appropriate degree of fairness with only minor impact on the satisfaction levels of collaborative peers.