Title: A game theory-based design of incentive schemes for social cloud services

Authors: Eric Kuada

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, School of Technology, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, Ghana

Abstract: This paper presents the design of incentive schemes that encourage the contribution of resources to the opportunistic cloud services (OCS) social cloud platform as well as the efficient usage of such resources. A game theoretic approach has been employed to model and design the incentive schemes with two game models presented. The existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium for both the cooperative and non-cooperative games has been proven. Three base incentive schemes have also been presented. These schemes are the dominant strategy scheme, equi-profit scheme, and dominant equi-profit scheme. Evaluation of the incentive schemes are performed and conclusion made that the schemes meet the desired properties of budget-balance, ex-post individual rationality, incentive compatibility, allocative efficiency, robustness, and flexibility to accommodate changing user behaviour on the OCS social cloud services platform.

Keywords: opportunistic cloud services; OCS; social cloud; game theory; incentive mechanisms; social network; cloud computing; system modelling; game models; mechanism design; resource allocation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2018.093773

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2018 Vol.7 No.2, pp.163 - 183

Accepted: 16 May 2018
Published online: 03 Aug 2018 *

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