Intercloud system and data communications protocol

Abstract

With the growing number of cloud users and the popularity of cloud services, there has been considerable interest in studying Intercloud models to support interaction between different cloud service providers. Inspired by the existing IEEE P2302 Intercloud framework and standards, we present an Intercloud architecture for Intercloud communications. To achieve an effective and secure communications between heterogeneous clouds, a standard Intercloud Communications Protocol (ICCP) is also presented. An Intercloud gateway application is implemented as an interface using ICCP to facilitate the communications. One of the major objectives for establishing an Intercloud system is to utilize the cloud resources. Cloud service providers may share or rent their resources to other clouds. Cloud services and resources discovery is the first and essential step to improve the resources utilization problem. Therefore, this project focus on investigating the resource discovery problems in the Intercloud system. First, we have extended the ICCP to support the resource discovery service in the system. Based on the Intercloud architecture, we develop analytical models by using queuing theory. The performance of two resource searching methods, sequential search and broadcast search, are compared and analyzed. According to our simulation results, the sequential search performs better than the broadcast search when there is a growing number of clouds and request arrival rate in the system. In addition, we have also studied the performance of the resource discovery process. In order to enhance the performance, optimization models for minimizing response time and cost are formulated. Analytical solutions are illustrated and validated by simulation results. The results show that the response time and cost is minimal when the proposed optimized scheme is adopted.