Coalitional Game for Community-Based Autonomous Web Services Cooperation

  • Authors:

  • An Liu;Qing Li;Liusheng Huang;Shi Ying;Mingjun Xiao

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou;City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong and USTC-CityU Joint Advanced Research Center, Suzhou;University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou;Wuhan University, Wuhan;University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Web services (WSs) can cooperate with each other to provide more valuable WSs. Current approaches for WS cooperation have typically assumed that WSs are always willing to participate in some form of cooperation, and have undermined the fact that WSs are autonomous in this open environment. This assumption, however, becomes more problematic in community-based WS cooperation due to the dynamic nature of WS community. It is, therefore, important to devise a cooperation scheme respecting WS autonomy for community-based WS cooperation. In this paper, we model the community-based cooperation among autonomous WSs as a coalitional game in graph form. We show this game is non-cohesive and design a distributed coalition formation algorithm. We prove that the proposed algorithm can lead to an individually stable coalition partition, which indicates that every WS can maximize its benefit through cooperation without decreasing other WSs' benefit. We also conduct extensive simulations, and the results show that the proposed algorithm can greatly improve the average payoff per WS and average availability per coalition when compared with other cooperation schemes.