Design of a QoS-based Framework for Service Ranking and Selection in Cloud E-marketplaces

Abstract

In most existing commercial cloud e-marketplaces, finding a suitable cloud service to perform user's objectives can be cognitively demanding and potentially affects the user satisfaction of both the process and outcome of decision making. Most existing cloud selection techniques have not sufficiently addressed the problem of service choice overload in a manner, that provides means that elicits subjective user preferences. Besides, only a few of these techniques suffice in situations where there are a large number of services to be evaluated and the results are presented in textual formats, either in a list or tables, which does not provide any means of comparison of results returned. Based on a comparative review of existing service selection techniques, a set of requirements was identified to guide the design of cloud service selection framework that would suffice in a cloud e-marketplace context. A cloud service selection framework was formulated that encapsulates the set of requirements. The increase in the number of available services on the e-marketplace leaves the users in the dilemma of which service to select, particularly when the services perform equivalent functionalities and may only differ with respect to their quality of service (QoS) attributes. The proposed framework is a viable proposition for the reduction service choice overload in cloud service e-marketplaces.