Comparison of AHP based and Fuzzy based mechanisms for ranking Cloud Computing services

Cloud Computing has emerged as a paradigm to deliver on demand resources to facilitate the customers with access to their infrastructure and applications as per their requirements on a subscription basis. An exponential increase in the number of cloud services in the past few years provides more options for customers to choose from. To assist customers in selecting a most trustworthy cloud provider, a unified trust evaluation framework is needed. Trust helps in the estimation of competency of a resource provider in completing a task thus enabling users to select the best resources in the heterogeneous cloud infrastructure. Trust estimates obtained using the AHP process exhibit a deviation for parameters that are not in direct proportion to the contributing attributes. Such deviation can be removed using the Fuzzy AHP model. In this paper, a Fuzzy AHP based hierarchical trust model has been proposed to rate the service providers and their various plans for infrastructure as a service.