Automated SLA Negotiation Framework for Cloud Computing

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a legal contract between parties to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) are provided the providers to the customers. A SLA negotiation between participants assists in defining the QoS requirements of critical service-based processes. However, the negotiation process for customers is a significant task particularly when there are multiple SaaS providers in the Cloud market, as service cost and quality are constantly changing and consumers have varying needs. Therefore, we propose a novel automated negotiation framework where a SaaS broker is utilized as the one-stop-shop for customers to achieve the required service efficiently when negotiating with multiple providers. The automated negotiation framework facilitates intelligent bilateral bargaining of SLAs between a SaaS broker and multiple providers to achieve different objectives for different participants. To maximize profit and improve customer satisfaction levels for the broker, we propose the design of counter offer generation strategies and decision making heuristics that take into account time, market constraints and trade-off between QoS parameters. Our negotiation heuristics are evaluated by extensive experimental studies of our framework using data from a real Cloud provider.