Elastic & Load-Spike Proof One-to-Many Negotiation to Improve the Service Acceptability of an Open SaaS Provider
Résumé
Service acceptability rate and user satisfaction are becoming key factors to avoid client churn and secure the success of any Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. Nevertheless, the provider must also accommodate fluctuating workloads and minimize the cost it pays to rent resources from the cloud. To address these contradicting concerns, most of existing works carry out resource management unilaterally by the provider. Consequently, end-user preferences and her subjective acceptability of the service are mostly ignored. In order to assess user satisfaction and service acceptability recent studies in the domain of Quality of Experience (QoE) recommend providers to use quantiles and percentile to gauge user service acceptability precisely. In this article we propose an elastic, load-spike proof, and adaptive one-to-many negotiation mechanism to improve the service acceptability of an open SaaS provider. Based on quantile estimation of service acceptability rate and a learned model of the user negotiation strategy, this mechanism adjusts the provider negotiation process in order to guarantee the desired service acceptability rate while meeting the budget limits of the provider and accommodating workload fluctuations. The proposed mechanism is implemented and its results are examined and analyzed.