A coral-reefs and Game Theory-based approach for optimizing elastic cloud resource allocation

•Bio-inspired coral-reefs optimization paradigm to model cloud elasticity.•Game theory-based approach to identify the best cloud resource reallocation schema.•Fuzzy linguistic SLA formalization.

Elasticity is a key feature in cloud computing, which distinguishes this paradigm from other ones, such as cluster and grid computing. On the other hand, dynamic resource reallocation is one of the most important and complex issues in cloud scenarios, which can be expressed as a multi-objective optimization problem with the opposing objectives of maximizing demand satisfaction and minimizing costs and resource consumptions. In this paper, we propose a meta-heuristic approach for cloud resource allocation based on the bio-inspired coral-reefs optimization paradigm to model cloud elasticity in a cloud-data center, and on the classic Game Theory to optimize the resource reallocation schema with respect to cloud provider's optimization objectives, as well as customer requirements, expressed through Service Level Agreements formalized by using a fuzzy linguistic method.