Alqarni, A (2022) Contributions to Service Level Agreement (SLA), Negotiation and Monitoring in Cloud Computing. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool John Moores University.

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Abstract

Cloud computing is a dynamic field of research, as the latest advances in the cloud computing applications have led to development of a plethora of cloud services in the areas of software, hardware, storage, internet of things connected to the cloud, and 5G supported by the cloud networks. Due to ever increasing developments and the subsequent emergence of a wide range of cloud services, a cloud market was created with cloud providers and customers seeking to buy the cloud services. With the expansion of the cloud market and the presence of a virtual environment in which cloud services are provided and managed, the face to-face meetings between customers and cloud providers is almost impossible, and the negotiation over the cloud services using the state-of-the-art autonomous negotiation agents has been theorized and researched by several researchers in the field of cloud computing, however, the solutions offered by literature are less applicable in the real-time cloud market with the evolving nature of services and customers’ requirements. Therefore, this study aimed to develop the solutions addressing issues in relation to negotiation of cloud services leading to the development of a service-level agreement (SLA), and monitoring of the terms and conditions specified in the SLA. We proposed the autonomous service-level framework supported by the autonomous agents for negotiating over the cloud services on behalf of the cloud providers and customers. The proposed framework contained gathering, filtering, negotiation and SLA monitoring functions, which enhanced its applicability in the real-time cloud market environment. Gathering and filtering stages facilitated the effectiveness of the negotiation phase based on the requirements of customers and cloud services available in the cloud market. The negotiation phase was executed by the selection of autonomous agents, leading to the creation of an SLA with metrics agreed upon between the cloud provider and the customer. Autonomous agents improved the efficiency of negotiation over multiple issues by creating the SLA within a short time and benefiting both parties involved in the negation phase. Rubinstein’s Alternating Offers Protocol was found to be effective in drafting the automated SLA solutions in the challenging environment of the cloud market. We also aimed to apply various autonomous agents to build the new algorithms which can be used to create novel negotiation strategies for addressing the issues in SLAs in cloud computing. The monitoring approach based on the CloudSim tool was found to be an effective strategy for detecting violations against the SLA, which can be an important contribution to building effective monitoring solutions for improving the quality of services in the cloud market.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Cloud computing; Cloud services; Negotiation; Autonomous agents; Service level agreement (SLA); Monitoring
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Divisions:	Computer Science & Mathematics
SWORD Depositor:	A Symplectic
Date Deposited:	19 Dec 2022 10:53
Last Modified:	19 Dec 2022 10:53
DOI or ID number:	10.24377/LJMU.t.00018399
Supervisors:	El Rhalibi, A
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/18399

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