Stressed web environments as strategic games: risk profiles and Weltanschauung

Abstract

We consider the behaviour of a set of services in a stressed web environment where performance patterns may be di cult to pre- dict. In stressed environments the performances of some providers may degrade while the performances of others, with elastic resources, may improve. The allocation of web-based providers to users (brokering) is modelled by a strategic non-cooperative angel-daemon game with risk pro les. A risk pro le speci es a bound on the number of unreliable ser- vice providers within an environment without identifying the names of these providers. Risk pro les o er a means of analysing the behaviour of broker agents which allocate service providers to users. A Nash equilib- rium is a xed point of such a game in which no user can locally improve their choice of provider { thus, a Nash equilibrium is a viable solution to the provider/user allocation problem. Angel daemon games provide a means of reasoning about stressed environments and o er the possibility of designing brokers using risk pro les and Nash equilibria.