Concurrent and cooperative negotiation of resources in cloud computing

This paper presents a game theory based cooperative resource cost negotiation scheme using agents, in a cloud computing environment. The scheme comprises of consumer agents, broker agents, and resource provider agents. The resource cost negotiation takes place between these agencies to expedite flexible pricing of cloud services, which adopts a many-to-many negotiation model for negotiating the cost of the resources between the consumers and providers. The scheme is simulated by using Java agent development environment (JADE) framework. The results obtained are compared with existing works on game theory and agent based models. It is observed that the consumers and brokers achieve lesser negotiation time and higher successful job offers at lesser cost, while IaaS cloud service providers (ICSPs) achieve higher resource utilization rate. Payoffs are also analyzed to test the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.