Adaptive and similarity-based tradeoff algorithms in a price-timeslot-QoS negotiation system to establish cloud SLAs

Since participants in a Cloud may be independent bodies, some mechanisms are necessary for resolving the different preferences to establish a service-level agreement (SLA) for Cloud service reservations. Whereas there are some mechanisms for supporting SLA negotiation, there is little or no negotiation support involving price, time slot, and QoS issues concurrently for a Cloud service reservation. For the concurrent price, timeslot, and QoS negotiation, a tradeoff algorithm to generate and evaluate a proposal which consists of price, timeslot, and QoS proposals is necessary. The contribution of this work is designing a multi-issue negotiation mechanism to facilitate 1) concurrent price, time slot, and QoS negotiations including the design of QoS utility functions and 2) adaptive and similarity-based trade-off proposals for price, time slots, and level of QoS issues. The tradeoff algorithm referred to as “adaptive burst mode” is especially designed to increase negotiation speed, total utility, and to reduce computational load for evaluating proposals by adaptively generating concurrent set of proposals. The empirical results obtained from simulations carried out using an agent-based testbed suggest that using the negotiation mechanism, (i) a consumer and a provider agent have a mutually satisfying agreement on price, time slot, and QoS issues in terms of the aggregated utility and (ii) the fastest negotiation speed with (iii) comparatively lower number of evaluated proposals in a negotiation.