Cloud computing service composition: A systematic literature review

The increasing tendency of network service users to use cloud computing encourages web service vendors to supply services that have different functional and nonfunctional (quality of service) features and provide them in a service pool. Based on supply and demand rules and because of the exuberant growth of the services that are offered, cloud service brokers face tough competition against each other in providing quality of service enhancements. Such competition leads to a difficult and complicated process to provide simple service selection and composition in supplying composite services in the cloud, which should be considered an NP-hard problem. How to select appropriate services from the service pool, overcome composition restrictions, determine the importance of different quality of service parameters, focus on the dynamic characteristics of the problem, and address rapid changes in the properties of the services and network appear to be among the most important issues that must be investigated and addressed. In this paper, utilizing a systematic literature review, important questions that can be raised about the research performed in addressing the above-mentioned problem have been extracted and put forth. Then, by dividing the research into four main groups based on the problem-solving approaches and identifying the investigated quality of service parameters, intended objectives, and developing environments, beneficial results and statistics are obtained that can contribute to future research.