A Negotiation Mechanism That Facilitates the Price-Timeslot-QoS Negotiation for Establishing SLAs of Cloud Service Reservation

A negotiation mechanism is essential to establish a service level agreement between Cloud participants who need to resolve different preferences of a Cloud service. Whereas there are some mechanisms for supporting service level agreement negotiation, there is little or no negotiation support of price, time slot, and QoS issues concurrently for a Cloud service reservation. The contribution of this work is designing a multi-issue negotiation mechanism to facilitate I) concurrent price, time slot, and QoS negotiations between agents representing Cloud participants and 2) trade-off proposals for price, time slots, and level of QoS issues. The ideas of the negotiation mechanism are implemented in an agent-based Cloud testbed, and the empirical results obtained from simulations carried out using the testbed suggest that using the concurrent 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) both agents achieved the highest negotiation speed among related approaches.