Cloud Service Negotiation: Concession vs. Tradeoff Approaches

For Cloud services, their non-functional properties like availability, reliability and security are important differentiators. However, service consumers and service providers may conflict over non-functional properties. In fact, the conflicts can be resolved via automated negotiation, which is considered as the most flexible approach to procure products and services. In this paper, we propose tradeoff approaches for Cloud service negotiation, and compare them with concession ones. As opposed to concession ones, tradeoff approaches do not reduce one´s utility, but still can create a proposal attractive to its opponent. Indeed, simulation results show that tradeoff approaches outperform concession ones in terms of both individual utility and social benefit. However, simulation results also demonstrate that tradeoff approaches under perform concession ones in terms of success rate.