A Price- and-Time-Slot-Negotiation Mechanism for Cloud Service Reservations

When making reservations for Cloud services, consumers

and providers need to establish service-level agreements

through negotiation. Whereas it is essential for both a consumer

and a provider to reach an agreement on the price of a service

and when to use the service, to date, there is little or no negotiation

support for both price and time-slot negotiations (PTNs) for Cloud

service reservations. This paper presents a multi-issue negotiation

mechanism to facilitate the following: 1) PTNs between Cloud

agents and 2) tradeoff between price and time-slot utilities. Unlike

many existing negotiation mechanisms in which a negotiation

agent can onlymake one proposal at a time, agents in this work are

designed to concurrently make multiple proposals in a negotiation

round that generate the same aggregated utility, differing only in

terms of individual price and time-slot utilities. Another novelty

of this work is formulating a novel time-slot utility function that

characterizes preferences for different time slots. These ideas are

implemented in an agent-based Cloud testbed. Using the testbed,

experiments were carried out to compare this work with

related approaches. Empirical results show that PTN agents reach

faster agreements and achieve higher utilities than other related

approaches. A case study was carried out to demonstrate the

application of the PTN mechanism for pricing Cloud resources.