Multi-agent Negotiation for User-centric Elasticity Management in the Cloud

Application Service Providers (ASP) are increasingly adopting the cloud computing paradigm to provision remote resources for their applications. Elasticity management solutions have been proposed in the domain to enable flexible and autonomic cloud resource provisioning. However, only few solutions consider the key issue of the conflict between ASP business goals and end-users preferences, that is to say Quality of Experience of the end-user. This paper proposes EMan, a decentralized approach for user-centric Elasticity Management. We use multi-agent automated negotiation strategies and tactics that allow the ASP to address the tradeoff between its customers satisfaction and its business objectives and achieve conflict-free solutions. We use Repast simulation environment to simulate EMan. The results show that the ASP can achieve the desired balance between its end-users satisfaction and its business objectives by combining different negotiation strategies and tactics.