Cloud SLA negotiation for energy saving — A particle swarm optimization approach

The necessity of balancing the obtained performance with the energy consumed is an emerging ambition for cloud computing research. Performance in cloud computing is defined through Service Level Agreement contracts between the cloud provider and cloud customer, being a projection of the customer's perspective on the service offered by the cloud provider. Although more and more research efforts go into standardizing Service Level Agreement in cloud systems, the area is still at its early ages. This paper proposes a Service Level Agreement negotiation protocol based on particle swarm optimization techniques, for obtaining a balance between the energy consumed and performance offered in the cloud. The two parties of the defined negotiation protocol are the performance-oriented cloud customer and the energy-oriented cloud provider. The agreement resulted from the negotiation process satisfies the two major negotiation properties we aim for: closeness to Pareto optimality and high social welfare.