Determination of optimal service level in cloud e-marketplaces based on service offering delay

Abstract

With the drift of consumers to the E-cloud marketplaces based on different service offerings, waiting time is of great importance to cloud service consumers and also the source of competitive advantage for cloud providers. Keeping customers waiting due to poor level of service leads to service degradation which in turn leads to breach of Service Level Agreement; and this may incur additional cost. We saw an opportunity to determine the optimum service level that minimizes the cost of delay in offering a service and made it our goal. Most researchers have approached this using the exogenous non-priority queue model; which would have been useful where service offerings are not differentiated. Our approach uses the Non-Preemptive queuing modeling. In this approach, the queuing theory is used to get our measure of effectiveness which is then used in our cost model to determine the optimal service level. We conclude that our results are useful where the providers need minimum cost to be incurred for better profit maximization.