We model the Virtual Organization (VO) formation problem in grids using concepts from coalitional game theory and design a distributed mechanism for solving it. The proposed distributed mechanism enables the formation of VOs guaranteeing the maximum profit for their participating Grid Service Providers (GSPs). We show that the proposed mechanism produces stable VOs, that is, the GSPs do not have incentives to break away from the current VO and join some other VO. We perform extensive simulation experiments using real workload traces to characterize the properties of the proposed distributed mechanism. The results show that the proposed distributed mechanism not only produces VOs that are stable yielding high revenue for the participating GSPs, but also decides the structure of the VOs in a reasonable amount of time.
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