In order to provide uninterrupted services and fulfill the requirements of customers, Horizontal Cloud Federation Formation (HCFF) has been proposed as a new model enabling cloud providers to cooperate and enlarge their virtual machine infrastructure capacity. In this paper, we have established a synthesis on the main related works in the literature by classifying them into two classes: reactive protocols of HCFF and proactive protocols of HCFF, while doing a comparison between them according to a number of well chosen criteria. Furthermore, we have proposed three protocols of cloud federation formation based on the theory of cooperative games. The protocols are: Sequential Protocol of Horizontal Cloud Federation Formation (SPHCFF), Parallel PHCFF (PPHCFF), and Overlapping PHCFF (OPHCFF). More precisely, our main contribution in this research is the introduction of the notion “Overlapping Federations” with the OPHCFF protocol by referring to the class of Overlapping Coalition Formation Games. Moreover, we have developed a new system of three components based on Inter-Cloud architecture, and then we have implemented it in real time to evaluate the proposed protocols. The obtained experimental results have shown that the OPHCFF protocol improves the average response time, the rate of processed applications, and the profit compared with the introduced PPHCFF protocol. In addition, despite the dissimilarities of architectures, protocols, and mathematical models of existing works, we have arrived to manage a simulation comparison of our SPHCFF with a concurrent mechanism called Cloud Federation Formation Mechanism (CFFM). The obtained simulation results have shown that the proposed SPHCFF performs better than the CFFM mechanism, when the overload rate is large enough, in terms of profit, federation size, time execution, and failure rate.

为了提供不间断的服务并满足客户的需求，水平云联合组建（HCFF）已被提出作为一种新模型，使云提供商能够合作并扩大其虚拟机基础架构容量。在本文中，我们将文献中的主要相关工作分为两类：HCFF的反应性规程和HCFF的主动性规程，同时根据许多精心选择的标准对它们进行比较，从而建立了综述。此外，我们基于合作博弈的理论提出了三种云联盟形成协议。协议为：水平云联合形成顺序协议（SPHCFF），并行PHCFF（PPHCFF）和重叠的PHCFF（OPHCFF）。更准确地说，我们在这项研究中的主要贡献是通过引用“重叠联盟形成游戏”的类别，将带有OPHCFF协议的概念“重叠联盟”引入。。此外，我们基于云间架构开发了一个由三部分组成的新系统，然后我们对其进行了实时实施以评估所提出的协议。获得的实验结果表明，与引入的PPHCFF协议相比，OPHCFF协议提高了平均响应时间，处理的应用程序的速率和利润。此外，尽管现有作品的架构，协议和数学模型不尽相同，但我们已经开始使用称为云联合形成机制（CFFM）的并发机制来管理SPHCFF的仿真比较。获得的仿真结果表明，在过载率足够大的情况下，从利润，联盟大小，时间执行和失败率等方面来看，所提出的SPHCFF的性能均优于CFFM机制。