Cloud Service Negotiation in Internet of Things Environment: A Mixed Approach

Internet of Things (IoT) allows connected objects to communicate via the Internet. IoT can benefit from the unlimited capabilities and resources of cloud computing. Also, when coupled with IoT, cloud computing can in turn deal with real world things in a more distributed and dynamic manner. As the cloud market becomes more open and competitive, Quality of Service (QoS) will be more important. However, cloud providers and cloud consumers have different, and sometimes opposite, preferences. If such a conflict occurs, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) cannot be reached without negotiation. A tradeoff negotiation approach can outperform a concession approach in terms of utility, but may incur more failures if information is incomplete. To balance utility and success rate, we propose a mixed approach for cloud service negotiation, which is based on the “game of chicken.” In particular, if one is uncertain about the strategy of its counterpart, it is best to mix concession and tradeoff strategies in negotiation. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive simulations. Results show that a mixed negotiation approach can achieve a higher utility than a concession approach, while incurring fewer failures than a tradeoff approach.