Multi-Criteria Service Selection Agent for Federated Cloud

— Federated cloud interconnects small and medium-sized cloud service providers for service enhancement to meet demand spikes. The service bartering technique in the federated cloud enables service providers to exchange their services. Selecting an optimal service provider to share services is challenging in the cloud federation. Agent-based and Reciprocal Resource Fairness (RRF) based models are used in the federated cloud for service selection. The agent-based model selects the best service provider using Quality of Service (quality of service). RRF model chooses fair service providers based on service providers' previous service contribution to the federation. However, the models mentioned above fail to address free rider and poor performer problems during the service provider selection process. To solve the above issue, we propose a Multi-criteria Service Selection (MCSS) algorithm for effectively selecting a service provider using quality of service, Performance-Cost Ratio (PCR), and RRF. Comprehensive case studies are conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm performance with the existing algorithm. The evaluation results demonstrated that MCSS provides 10% more services selection efficiency than Cloud Resource Bartering System (CRBS) and provides 16% more service selection efficiency than RPF.