Intelligent agents for automated cloud computing negotiation

Presently, cloud providers offer “off-the-shelf” Service Level Agreements (SLA), on a “take it or leave it” basis. This paper, alternatively, proposes customized SLAs. An automated negotiation is needed to establish customized SLAs between service providers and consumers with no previous knowledge of each other. Traditional negotiations between humans are often fraught with difficulty. Thus, in this work, the use of intelligent agents to represent cloud providers and consumers is advocated. Rubinstein's Alternating Offers Protocol offers a suitable technical solution for this challenging problem. The purpose of this paper is to apply the state-of-the-art in negotiation automated algorithms/agents within a described Cloud Computing SLA framework, and to evaluate the most appropriate negotiation approach based on many criteria.