Game Theoretic Storage Outsourcing in the Mobile Blockchain Mining Network

Small and medium enterprise systems need to be preserved which is a necessity for our country as the growth is at the grass roots levels. Cloud computing can be a solution to help preserve the small and medium enterprises by promoting their services through the web as they can avoid huge infrastructure costs. However, most of the enterprise practitioners are not technology savvy, and it will be a daunting task to choose the best select service provider from the vast number of cloud service providers present. Hence, in this paper a comprehensive three-pronged technique which will facilitate the easy selection of cloud service providers is proposed. An interval valued fuzzy soft sets algorithm is used to rank the cloud service providers based on the user ratings of the cloud service providers. The information regarding the cloud service providers has been collected to create ontology to match the service providers with user requirements. This suite of tools can be used by the enterprise owners to select the best cloud service provider for their requirements with minimum IT knowledge.

With the development of information technologies, the needs such as transferring and storing data, and providing quick access to the data have arisen. Cloud service providers have emerged on these needs. Businesses can stream and store data, and access it at any time over a fixed portal thanks to cloud service providers which have advantages such as low storage costs, working with cross-platforms, fast data flow and access facilities at any time. In this context, considering the importance of data in the effective management of commercial organizations, these advantages of cloud computing systems offer great opportunities to businesses. From this point of view, it can be said that an analytical evaluation is of great importance in the selection of cloud service providers. Within this scope, in this study, the criteria such as performance, satisfaction, data transfer rate, suitability and network latency, etc.) that businesses should consider renting the most suitable cloud service provider were examined and cloud service providers were compared under these criteria by suitable multi-criteria decision-making algorithms.KeywordsCloud information systemsCloud service providerNetwork latencyCloud service provider

Dynamics of service selection and provider pricing game in heterogeneous cloud market

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm, with provisioning model generally consisting of cloud service providers (CSPs), network service providers (NSPs), and end users. The associated economics has opened up a new research area; and with the expansion of the cloud computing market, the relationship between CSPs and NSPs, is changing profoundly. In addition to providing the default network services, traditional NSPs, in attempt to compete with CSPs, have started offering cloud services to end users. Though much progress has been made toward addressing competitions among CSPs themselves or among NSPs themselves, few studies have focused on the competition between CSPs and NSPs. In this paper, we investigate the problem of insufficient studies on the competition between CSPs and NSPs by presenting a new economic model to characterize the competition between CSPs and NSPs, and by conducting thorough theoretical analysis as well as numeric experiments to validate the proposed model. We believe, based on results, that the proposed economic model is general and feasible, and thus is applicable to modeling the competition among service providers in cloud computing market.

Providing resources to different users or applications is fundamental to cloud computing. This is a challenging problem as a cloud service provider may have insufficient resources to satisfy all user requests. Furthermore, allocating available resources optimally to different applications is also challenging. Resource sharing among different cloud service providers can improve resource availability and resource utilization as certain cloud service providers may have free resources available that can be “rented” by other service providers. However, different cloud service providers can have different objectives or utilities. Therefore, there is a need for a framework that can share and allocate resources in an efficient and effective way, while taking into account the objectives of various service providers that results in a multi-objective optimization problem. In this paper, we present a Cooperative Game Theory (CGT) based framework for resource sharing and allocation among different service providers with varying objectives that form a coalition. We show that the resource sharing problem can be modeled as an N–player canonical cooperative game with non-transferable utility (NTU) and prove that the game is convex for monotonic non-decreasing utilities. We propose an $\mathcal{O}\left( N \right)$ algorithm that provides an allocation from the core, hence guaranteeing Pareto optimality. We evaluate the performance of our proposed resource sharing framework in a number of simulation settings and show that our proposed framework improves user satisfaction and utility of service providers.

Online service is used to be as Pay-Per-Use in Cloud computing. Service user need not be in a long time contract with cloud service providers. Service level agreements (SLAs) are understandings marked between a cloud service providers and others, for example, a service user, intermediary operator, or observing operators. Since cloud computing is an ongoing technology giving numerous services to basic business applications and adaptable systems to manage online agreements are significant. SLA maintains the quality-of-service to the cloud user. If service provider fails to maintain the required service SLA is considered to be SLA violated. The main aim is to minimize the SLA violations for maintain the QoS of their cloud users. In this research article, a toolbox is proposed to help the procedure of exchanging of a SLA with the service providers that will enable the cloud client in indicating service quality demands and an algorithm as well as Negotiation model is also proposed to negotiate the request with the service providers to produce a better agreement between service provider and cloud service consumer. Subsequently, the discussed framework can reduce SLA violations as well as negotiation disappointments and have expanded cost-adequacy. Moreover, the suggested SLA toolkit is additionally productive to clients so clients can secure a sensible value repayment for diminished QoS or conceding time. This research shows the assurance level in the cloud service providers can be kept up by as yet conveying the services with no interruption from the client's perspective

In the Internet of Things (loT) era, edge computing is a promising paradigm to improve the quality of service for latency sensitive applications by filling gaps between the loT devices and the cloud infrastructure. Highly geo-distributed edge computing resources that are managed by independent and competing service providers pose new challenges in terms of resource allocation and effective resource sharing to achieve a globally efficient resource allocation. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based model for allocating computing resources in an edge computing platform that allows service providers to establish resource sharing contracts with edge infrastructure providers apriori using smart contracts in Ethereum. The smart contract in the proposed model acts as the auctioneer and replaces the trusted third-party to handle the auction. The blockchain-based auctioning protocol increases the transparency of the auction-based resource allocation for the participating edge service and infrastructure providers. The design of sealed bids and bid revealing methods in the proposed protocol make it possible for the participating bidders to place their bids without revealing their true valuation of the goods. The truthful auction design and the utility-aware bidding strategies incorporated in the proposed model enables the edge service providers and edge infrastructure providers to maximize their utilities. We implement a prototype of the model on a real blockchain test bed and our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability and performance efficiency of the proposed approach.

Opening up a SaaS based cloud application for interactions with partners is an important aspect of Cloud Computing. This is a win-win situation for both: the Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and the integration partners aka Independent Service Vendors (ISV). The intention is to use the Cloud Application as a platform and try to create a partner eco-system around the platform. The CSPs can select companies or solutions that add high business value to the platform in turn increasing value of partnering solutions. Bringing these partners on-board is a lengthy process that usually involves administrators and/or Customer Service Representatives (CSR) making multiple changes at multiple places. This paper discusses all aspects of Partner offering management including steps and possible tools to make this process a self-serviced one. Catalog management - Offering management deals with adding a new partner application to the Cloud Service Provider''s catalog (provisioning) and then to all the aspects of Catalog management. Catalog management includes adding/deleting/importing/exporting offerings, managing offering related attributes, managing access controls etc. Once the new service is provisioned, it becomes available to customers of Service Providers. This paper discusses offering management and its various aspects in detail. Platform integration points - The partner application admins need to provide access points for their applications in from multiple places in Cloud Service Provider''s application like menu items, navigational elements, banners, footers etc. These access points may then be globally visible or have limited visibility to users by organization. We will discuss a Menu Item management service which helps integrate partner applications at various integration points by providing the necessary APIs. We will also describe how custom menu items can be created by an Organization Admin to launch vendor applications. Handshake between partner application and CSP offering: The handshake allows partner application and Cloud service Provider''s offering to work together. There must be a licensing agreement between these two applications to access each other''s data and services. A range of solutions can be used for this purpose, starting from a simple authentication mechanism to Oauth.

Cloud storage provides great benefits and advantages like reduction in cost, increased flexibility, elasticity and the efficient use of resources. With these great advantages, there are concerns and problem for cloud users. Some obstacles in using cloud computing services are because of its distributed and untransparent nature. That's why users have no control over their data and information and are not sure of whether or not to trust cloud providers. Therefore, the objective of this research is to examine the influence of customer and provider characteristics on cloud service outcome, impact of Trust on cloud service outcome, and to examine if Trust mediate the relationship of customer characteristics and provider’s characteristics with cloud service outcome. In order to achieve the objectives of this research, the analyses of measurement model, factor analysis, assessment of structure model and regression analysis has been conducted. The Findings of this study shows that the existing threats in cloud service is one of the reason why users are not trusting cloud service providers. These threats which are privacy and security cause unwillingness to use cloud services. This study also found that Trust plays an enormous role for cloud service users and providers because it increases usage, willingness to use among customers, and reputation of cloud service providers. It also found that Outcome is really low if there is no trust in these services. This study will help cloud service providers/developers to know the reasons why some people and organizations are not willing to use their services.

Cloud computing has empowered the individual user by providing seemingly unlimited storage space and availability and accessibility of data anytime and anywhere. Cloud service providers are able to maximize data storage space by incorporating data deduplication into cloud storage. Although data deduplication removes data redundancy and data replication, it also introduces major data privacy and security issues for the user. In this paper, a new privacy-preserving framework that addresses this issue is proposed. Our framework uses an efficient deduplication algorithm to divide a given file into smaller units. These units are then encrypted by the user using the combination of a secure hash function and a block encryption algorithm. An index tree of hash values of these units is also generated and encrypted using an asymmetric search encryption scheme by the user. This index tree will enable the cloud service provider to search through the index and return the requested units. We will show that our proposed framework will allow cloud service and storage providers to employ data deduplication techniques without giving them access to either the users' plaintexts or the users' decryption keys.

Multi objective trust aware task scheduling algorithm in cloud computing using whale optimization

Cloud computing is currently the most hyped and popular paradigm in the domain of distributed computing. Multiple vendors are providing infrastructure, platform, and software-related cloud products or solutions, and the number of such vendors is growing rapidly. But the reality is that there is very little in the form of standards in general and interoperability standards in particular. This leads to a challenging situation for cloud service consumers as they need to use solutions provided by multiple cloud vendors in order to fulfill their business requirements, and the lack of standardization leads to lack of interoperability among the solutions provided by varied vendors. Service brokers act as intermediaries between the cloud service providers and consumers. The role of service brokers becomes critical in situations that need integration among multiple systems as they bridge the interoperability gaps among multiple cloud solutions and thus compensate for the lack of standards. They do so by acting as agents adding value on behalf of the service consumers. The usage of such cloud brokers also helps to future-proof the solution as service brokers add a layer of indirection, thus enabling loose coupling among the cloud service consumers and providers. The aim of this chapter is to review the role of cloud service brokers in cloud computing. The review includes consolidation of the definitions and characteristics of cloud service brokers, review of the current brokerage solutions, and interfacing requirements. Also presented are a high-level cloud service broker functional architecture, criteria for selection of a cloud service broker, future trends and review of benefits, and challenges of using cloud service brokers.

Most of the web (mobile) applications are using cloud computing technology. Developers who want to develop an application can make use of the provisions and services provided by a cloud service provider. There are a number cloud service providers (CSPs). Each of these cloud service providers offer a number of services. Going through all the services of all the CSPs and finding out what service matches the requirements in the SLA document, manually is time consuming, error prone and tedious. And opting for all the services will add extra charges for the owner. Hence it is important to have a system that can match the requirements in the SLA (Service Level Agreement) document with the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) of the cloud service providers. This paper proposes a method to match the requirements of a businessman with the APIs of the CSPs. The requirements are written in a text document and the description of the APIs of CSPs are written in another text document. Then using text similarity in natural language processing, the APIs that satisfy the requirements in the text document are identified.

Data Portability: Key to Cloud Portability and Interoperability

A service chain (SC) comprises a series of service functions realized as virtualized network functions (VNFs). Each VNF has specific resource, bandwidth, and location requirements. This study assumes multiple SCs to be placed on geo-distributed heterogeneous edge servers owned by multiple edge service providers (ESPs). Each ESP selectively hosts SCs to earn profit. We consider the problem to maximize the total profit (i.e., social welfare) of all ESPs by organizing ESPs into a set of disjoint federations called federation structure. We formulate the problem of finding an optimal federation structure, identify the difficulties in solving the problem, and present two time-efficient heuristics as our approach. Simulation results show that elaborate federation structures do bring in higher social welfare compared with simple all-in or all-out ESP organization. The proposed heuristics can also approximate the optimal result in many cases.