Distributed bandwidth selection approach for cooperative peer to peer multi-cloud platform Bipasha Mahato 1 & Deepsubhra Guha Roy 1 & Debashis De 1,2 Received: 2 May 2019 /Accepted: 14 April 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Network function virtualization (NFV) is a well-accepted software-defined network (SDN) architecture concept. NFV is sever- ally used in cloud platform to enhance the utilization of available network resources. The concept behind NFV is a design of software process architecture with a bunch of collaborative resource utilization functions. The progression of platform providers builds a communication service plan with the help of virtual machines. We propose biogeography-based optimization (BBO) technique in order to enrich virtual network functions (VNFs) to utilize available bandwidth resource in an energy-efficient and cost-effective manner. The cooperative bandwidth sharing approach using BBO reduces delay mean at the time of supervision the impending requests in a multi-cloud environment. Experimental results validate that the utilization of available bandwidth has increased using the proposed scheme with respect to the single user-dedicated resource allocation and multi-user dedicated resource allocation. Delay means, as well as subscription cost, has reduced compared to the existing methods. The correctness of the investigational outcome has been established using an experimental setup along with the proposed algorithm. Keywords Bandwidth selection . Network function virtualization (NFV) . Multicloud . Biogeography-based optimization . Dynamic pricing . Software defined network (SDN) 1 Introduction Bandwidth sharing and re-utilization of resource bandwidth un- der mobile cloud computing is one of the recognised challenges when it comes to satisfy both the cloud service provider (CSP) and subscribers at the same time [ 1]. Suitable upload and down- load speed in between the cloud server and end nodes is one of those demanding issues where mobile devices are increasingly becoming an inescapable essential part of our daily life. Mobile devices have now higher computational capacity, higher porta- bility, low cost of hardware components. This equipment act as a way through which users can run online web applications, pro- cessing of images, can do financial activities, mobile e-com- merce, mobile gaming, mobile banking, mobile sensing, health monitoring, and system administration applications, coding, in- ternet of things (IoT) and so on using the device. All these in- spired applications deal with real-time data which requires a higher level of computation. To fetch those real-time data from the server or from multiple clouds and upload data to share higher bandwidth is required by the users. As a result, resource fewer device handlers are requesting for resources from multiple cloud service provider to use mobile cloud computing (MCC) service, which takes a major role in this scenario [2, 3]. MCC is an integration of mobile computing and cloud com- puting [4]. In MCC, computation is done outside the mobile devices, take place in the private or public cloud servers and the result of the computation sends back to the mobile devices. MCC is fundamentally needed when mobile devices related soft- ware and hardware resource issues occur [5]. MCC provides easy to resolve peer to peer way from the problems like relatively small battery life, large memory requirement, software longing, hefty computational infrastructure etc. Efficiency also improved in the sense of cost and time. Mobile users are requesting for cloud services via the user interface which is passing through the * Debashis De dr.debashis.de@gmail.com Bipasha Mahato mahatobipasha.91@gmail.com Deepsubhra Guha Roy roysubhraguha@gmail.com 1 Centre of Mobile Cloud Computing, School of Computaional Science, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal, Haringhata, Nadia, West Bengal 741249, India 2 University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-020-00917-2