Dynamic partner selection in Cloud Federation for ensuring the quality of service for cloud consumers

Abstract

Cloud Computing has become the popular paradigm for accessing the various scalable and on-demand computing services over the internet. Nowadays, individual Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offering specialized services to the customers collaborate to form the Cloud Federation, in order to reap the real benefits of Cloud Computing. By collaboration, the member CSPs of the federation achieve better resource utilization and Quality of Service (QoS), thereby increasing their business prospects. When a CSP runs out of resources in the Cloud Federation, in order to offload the customer requests for resources to other CSP(s), identifying a suitable partner is a challenging task due to the lack of global coordination among them. In this paper, we propose the design and implementation of an efficient partner selection mechanism in the Cloud Federation, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods, and also considering the trust values of various CSPs in the federation. The AHP method is used to calculate the weights of the QoS parameters used in the TOPSIS method which is used to rank the various CSPs in the Cloud Federation according to the user requirements. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this approach in order to efficiently select the trustworthy partners in large scale federations to ensure the required QoS to the cloud consumers.