Cloud computing service negotiation: A systematic review
Introduction
Enterprises always need reliable, secure, and affordable information technology infrastructures. Cloud computing can provide solutions that fulfill these requirements. A cloud is a large group of interconnected computers that extends beyond a single company or enterprise [1], [2]. Resources and applications are provided by cloud service providers via public or private networks. Cloud service consumers and providers have different requirements and objectives, which are usually opposed to one another. Since agents assigned to consumers and providers have conflicting goals, negotiations can provide a solution to establish a service-level agreement (SLA) between them. Negotiation is a process by which a group of agents communicates with one another to try to come to a mutually acceptable agreement on some matter [2]. Researches designed different e-negotiation systems to address this problem. E-negotiation systems play a very important role in helping agents with conflicting goals reach an agreement. In order to design and implement an e-negotiation system, the negotiation protocol and negotiation strategy must be clearly specified. A negotiation protocol shows how a negotiator can interact with others. It also specifies the structure and context of messages circulated among the agents. A negotiation strategy determines the decision-making functions of the agents. Agents can accept, reject, or generate counter offers after receiving and analyzing an offer. Initially, e-negotiation systems were applied to buying/selling goods in the e-commerce segment. Chavez and Maes [3] proposed an agent marketplace called KASBAH. The KASBAH provides e-negotiation for the created agents of the buyer/seller to buy and sell items. KASBAH provides benefits to the participants through interaction and competition among agents in the marketplace. However, the marketplace was not apply intelligent techniques to maximize utilities for the participants. E-commerce researchers had applied different intelligent techniques to provide the maximum utility for the participants in the years before the advent of cloud computing. Chan et al. [4], Nassiri-Mofakham et al. [5], Wang and Dai [6], Castro-Schez et al. [7], and Chen and Huang [8] proposed negotiation schemes for e-commerce by using the fuzzy logic theory. Dong and Li [9], Papaioannou et al. [10], and Carbonneau et al. [11] proposed negotiation schemes for e-commerce by using neural networks. Li et al. [12], Shen et al. [13], and Song and Zhang [14] used genetic algorithm to create negotiation systems in e-commerce.
Automated negotiation has been proposed as an ideal approach to procure cloud services. The CCSN is an e-negotiation system that allows cloud consumers and providers to automatically negotiate on important buying/selling issues. The CCSN aims to provide the maximum utility for both trading parties in the possible shortest time. Studies on the CCSN have increased rapidly due to the importance of the SLA establishment between cloud consumers and providers. The CCSN models were first introduced in 2010 [15], [16]. Sim [2] proposed a many-to-many negotiation model among consumer agents and broker agents. Brokers can negotiate in multiple the types of cloud resource markets with multiple groups of cloud resource providers, based on consumer requirements. One of the first attempts to propose an architecture for cloud service management was presented by Brandic et al. [16]. Their work evolved novel concepts for an automatic bootstrapping between different protocols to increase the number of services a consumer may negotiate with, but no negotiation strategy was defined. Afterward, researches proposed novel ideas to consider participants' satisfaction and negotiation speed. These researches will be studied in Section 3.3. This paper provides a systematic review of frameworks, approaches, and techniques in addressing CCSN. We will study all of the strong and valuable works in this scope. The advantages and defects of each work will be enumerated. Then, we will investigate tendencies of the researchers to design a new strategy or select existing strategies. We will also classify the CCSN works based on different important parameters involved in negotiation process. After proposing the questions, current the CCSN approaches will be studied. Strengths and weaknesses of each work will be mentioned. Descriptions of the works in Section 3.3 will show how they improved the CCSN models from 2010 until 2016.
The remainder of this paper is organized as: Section 2 describes research objectives and proposes some questions. Section 3 gives a general view of the CCSN and studies related works. Section 4 evaluates the studied works and the answers to the questions proposed in Section 2. Section 4 also expresses open issues that must be addressed by more research in future.
Section snippets
Research objectives
This paper will help researchers to propose efficient CCSN models in future. This section places some questions that will be addressed after studying and analyzing the current CCSN approaches. Next, the studied and evaluated researches in this paper will be described. The studied researches can be divided into three categories based on the service type. The first category of the researches proposes that the CCSN provide software as a service (SaaS). The SaaS delivers software remotely accessed
CCSN definition
This section provides a general definition of the CCSN. Consumers express functional and nonfunctional requirements, which they wish to be met. On the other hand, providers want to maximize his/her utility by selling service in accordance with his/her favorite requirements. QoS issues play the main role in the acceptance or rejection of a cloud service by a consumer. For example, consumers want a cloud service with the minimum response time, maximum availability, and maximum reliability. The
Discussion
In this section, we classify the studied works based on multiple aspects to answer the questions mentioned in Section 2.1. The studied works are 25 papers selected from authentic and creditable journals, international conferences, and book chapters. Table 1 contains the following information for each studied work: (1) the negotiation strategy approach; (2) the negotiation protocol; (3) the service types supported by the negotiation mechanism; (4) the issues the negotiators can negotiate; (5)
Conclusion and future works
This paper reviews algorithms, mechanisms, and frameworks about cloud computing service negotiation and some e-negotiation works related to other computing environments so that their main ideas can be applied to cloud computing. We described the novelties and innovations of the valuable works. Future studies can develop these ideas to improve the current CCSN works. We also investigated the strengths and weaknesses of each work. So, we classified the works, based on strategy, protocol, and
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