On trust guided collaboration among cloud service providers

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm that offers computing resources (e.g. CPU, storage, bandwidth, software) as scalable and on-demand services over the Internet. As more players enter this emerging market, a heterogeneous cloud computing market is expected to evolve, where individual players will have different volumes of resources, and will provide specialized services, and with different levels of quality of services. It is expected that service providers will thus, besides competing, also collaborate to complement their resources in order to improve resource utilization and combine individual services to offer more complex value chains and end-to-end solutions required by the customers. It is challenging to select suitable partners in a decentralized setting due to various factors such as lack of global coordination or information, as well as diversity and scale. Trust is known to play an important role in promoting cooperation in many decentralized settings including the society at large, as well as on the Internet, e.g., in e-commerce, etc. In this paper, we explore how trust can promote collaboration among service providers. The novelty of our approach is a framework to combine disparate trust information - from direct interactions and from (indirect) references among service providers, as well as from customer feedbacks, depending on availability of these different kinds of information. Doing so provides decision making guidance to service providers to initialize collaborations by selecting trustworthy partners. Simulation results demonstrate the promise of our approach by showing that compared to random selection, our proposal can help effectively select trustworthy collaborators to achieve better quality of services.