Relaxed Time Slot Negotiation for Grid Resource Allocation

Since participants in a computational grid may be independent bodies, some mechanisms are necessary for resolving the differences in their preferences for price and desirable time slots for utilizing/leasing computing resources. Whereas there are mechanisms for supporting price negotiation for grid resource allocation, there is little or no negotiation support for allocating mutually acceptable time slots for grid participants. The contribution of this work is designing a negotiation mechanism for facilitating time slot negotiations between grid participants. In particular, this work adopts a relaxed time slot negotiation protocol designed to enhance the success rate and resource utilization level by allowing some flexibility for making slight adjustments following a tentative agreement for a mutually acceptable time slot. The ideas of the relaxed time slot negotiation are implemented in an agent-based grid testbed, and empirical results of the relaxed time slot negotiation mechanism carried out, (i) a consumer and a provider agent have a mutually satisfying agreement on time slot and price, (ii) consumer agents achieved higher success rates in negotiation, and (iii) provider agents achieved higher utility and resource utilization of overall grid.