A Protocol Development Framework for SLA Negotiations in Cloud and Service Computing

As businesses transit towards cloud and service oriented economy, agents are employed to efficiently negotiate service level agreements (SLAs) on services procured automatically to match changes in demand. This 'pay-as-you-go' trading model affords flexibility with reliability, but requires customized and seamless interactions enabled by negotiation protocols that best serve the market domain. To this end, we present a domain-independent framework based on a protocol development lifecycle, comprising four distinct phases namely modeling, verification, rule-based implementation and generic execution. We illustrate all phases by introducing the Simple Bilateral Negotiation Protocol (SBNP) - a multi-tier, multi-round and customizable negotiation protocol. We exemplify its adoption among chains of service providers that serve SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings. We show that SBNP is well-formed, deterministic and deadlock-free. We evaluate state space scalability for SBNP and verify its correctness using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). Finally, we show that rule-based implementation allows for generic execution of multiple protocols on our negotiation platform, which provides businesses the agility to sustain competitive advantage.

[1]  Aspassia Daskalopulu,et al.  Model Checking Contractual Protocols , 2001, ArXiv.

[2]  Jens Happe,et al.  A Reference Architecture for Multi-Level SLA Management , 2011 .

[3]  Anca Muscholl,et al.  A Kleene theorem and model checking algorithms for existentially bounded communicating automata , 2006, Inf. Comput..

[4]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Specifying Rules for Electronic Auctions , 2002, AI Mag..

[5]  Erich Schikuta,et al.  Aggregation patterns of service level agreements , 2010, FIT.

[6]  W. L. Yeung,et al.  Behavioral modeling and verification of multi-agent systems for manufacturing control , 2011, Expert Syst. Appl..

[7]  Augustín Escámez Chimeno,et al.  A Generic Platform for Conducting SLA Negotiations , 2011 .

[8]  Mordechai Ben-Ari,et al.  Principles of the spin model checker , 2008 .

[9]  Stefan Kirn,et al.  Towards model checking & simulation of a multi-tier negotiation protocol for service chains , 2010, AAMAS.

[10]  Mark Klein,et al.  Negotiating Complex Contracts , 2003, AAMAS '02.

[11]  Stefan Leue,et al.  Formalization and validation of the General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) using PROMELA and SPIN , 2000, International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer.

[12]  George S. Avrunin,et al.  Patterns in property specifications for finite-state verification , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (IEEE Cat. No.99CB37002).

[13]  Asit Dan,et al.  Web services agreement specification (ws-agreement) , 2004 .

[14]  Francesco Torelli,et al.  The SLA Model , 2011 .

[15]  Dimosthenis Kyriazis,et al.  Platform-as-a-Service Architecture for Real-Time Quality of Service Management in Clouds , 2010, 2010 Fifth International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services.

[16]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  A Classification Scheme for Negotiation in Electronic Commerce , 2001 .

[17]  Mark Klein,et al.  Protocols for Negotiating Complex Contracts , 2003, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[18]  Benedikt Bollig,et al.  Learning Communicating Automata from MSCs , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[19]  Jin Tong,et al.  NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture , 2011, 2011 IEEE World Congress on Services.

[20]  Gerard J. Holzmann,et al.  The Model Checker SPIN , 1997, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[21]  Lars-Åke Fredlund,et al.  Book Review: Design and Validation of Computer Protocols by Gerard J. Holzmann (Prentice Hall, 1991) , 1991, CCRV.

[22]  Torsten Eymann,et al.  A Negotiation Protocol Description Language for Automated Service Level Agreement Negotiations , 2009, 2009 IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing.

[23]  I. Foster,et al.  Service-Oriented Science , 2005, Science.