The Need of an Optimal QoS Repository and Assessment Framework in Forming a Trusted Relationship in Cloud: A Systematic Review

© 2017 IEEE. Due to the cost-effectiveness and scalable features of the cloud the demand of its services is increasing every next day. Quality of Service (QOS) is one of the crucial factor in forming a viable Service Level Agreement (SLA) between a consumer and the provider that enable them to establish and maintain a trusted relationship with each other. SLA identifies and depicts the service requirements of the user and the level of service promised by provider. Availability of enormous service solutions is troublesome for cloud users in selecting the right service provider both in terms of price and the degree of promised services. On the other end a service provider need a centralized and reliable QoS repository and assessment framework that help them in offering an optimal amount of marginal resources to requested consumer. Although there are number of existing literatures that assist the interaction parties to achieve their desired goal in some way, however, there are still many gaps that need to be filled for establishing and maintaining a trusted relationship between them. In this paper we tried to identify all those gaps that is necessary for a trusted relationship between a service provider and service consumer. The aim of this research is to present an overview of the existing literature and compare them based on different criteria such as QoS integration, QoS repository, QoS filtering, trusted relationship and an SLA

Challenges to describe QoS requirements for web services quality prediction to support web services interoperability in electronic commerce

Quality of service (QoS) is significant and necessary for web service applications quality assurance. Furthermore, web services quality has contributed to the successful implementation of Electronic Commerce (EC) applications. However, QoS is still the big issue for web services research and remains one of the main research questions that need to be explored. We believe that QoS should not only be measured but should also be predicted during the development and implementation stages. However, there are challenges and constraints to determine and choose QoS requirements for high quality web services. Therefore, this paper highlights the challenges for the QoS requirements prediction as they are not easy to identify. Moreover, there are many different perspectives and purposes of web services, and various prediction techniques to describe QoS requirements. Additionally, the paper introduces a metamodel as a concept of what makes a good web service

A hierarchical decision-making framework for the assessment of the prediction capability of prognostic methods

In prognostics and health management, the prediction capability of a prognostic method refers to its ability to provide trustable predictions of the remaining useful life, with the quality characteristics required by the related maintenance decision making. The prediction capability heavily influences the decision makers' attitude toward taking the risk of using the predicted remaining useful life to inform the maintenance decisions. In this article, a four-layer, top-down, hierarchical decision-making framework is proposed to assess the prediction capability of prognostic methods. In the framework, prediction capability is broken down into two criteria (Layer 2), six sub-criteria (Layer 3) and 19 basic sub-criteria (Layer 4). Based on the hierarchical framework, a bottom-up, quantitative approach is developed for the assessment of the prediction capability, using the information and data collected at the Layer-4 basic sub-criteria level. Analytical hierarchical process is applied for the evaluation and aggregation of the sub-criteria and support vector machine is applied to develop a classification-based approach for prediction capability assessment. The framework and quantitative approach are applied on a simulated case study to assess the prediction capabilities of three prognostic methods of the literature: fuzzy similarity, feed-forward neural network and hidden semi-Markov model. The results show the feasibility of the practical application of the framework and its quantitative assessment approach, and that the assessed prediction capability can be used to support the selection of the suitable prognostic method for a given application

Financial development and industrial capital accumulation

In an economy where decisions are decentralized and made under conditions of uncertainty, the financial system can be seen as the complex of institutions, infrastructure, and instruments that society adopts to minimize the costs of trading promises when agents have incomplete trust and limited information. Building on a microeconomic general equilibrium model that portrays such fundamental financial functions, the author shows that, in line with recent empirical evidence, the development of financial infrastructure stimulates greater and more efficient capital accumulation. He also shows that economies with more developed financial infrastructure can more easily absorb exogenous shocks to output. The results call for addressing a crucial issue in the sequencing of reform in the financial sector: early in development, banks provide essential financial infrastructure services as part of their exclusive relationships with borrowers. Further economic development requires that such services be provided extrinsically to the bank-borrower relationship, clearly at the expense of bank rents. There may be a compelling discontinuity to financial sector development in that banks need to be supported early in development but to be"weakened"later - at the expense of bank rents - to foster further development. The important question for policy is when and how to generate and manage this discontinuity so that it is not forced on society by costly and traumatic events such as bank failures.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Decentralization,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring

The role of trust in financial sector development

In any economic environment where decisions are decentralized, agents consider the risk that others might unfairly exploit informational asymmetries to their own disadvantage. Incomplete results, especially, lies at the heart of financial transactions in which agents trade real claims for promises of future real claims. Agents thus need to invest considerable resources to assess the trustworthiness of others with whom they know they can interact only under conditions of limited and asymmetrically distributed information. Thinking of finance as the complex of institutions and instruments needed to reduce the cost of trading promises among anonymous individuals who do not fully trust each other, the author analyzes how incomplete trust shapes the transaction costs in trading assets, and how it affects resource allocation and pricing decisions from rational, forward-looking agents. His analysis leads to core propositions about the role of finance and financial efficiency in economic development. He recommends areas of financial sector reform in emerging economies aimed at improving the financial system's efficiency in dealing with incomplete trust. Among other things, the public sector can improve trust in finance by improving financial infrastructure, including legal systems, financial regulation, and security in payment and trading systems. But fundamental improvements in financial efficiency may best be gained by eliciting good conduct through market forces.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Decentralization,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform,Insurance&Risk Mitigation

Formulating and managing viable SLAs in cloud computing from a small to medium service provider's viewpoint: A state-of-the-art review

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd In today's competitive world, service providers need to be customer-focused and proactive in their marketing strategies to create consumer awareness of their services. Cloud computing provides an open and ubiquitous computing feature in which a large random number of consumers can interact with providers and request services. In such an environment, there is a need for intelligent and efficient methods that increase confidence in the successful achievement of business requirements. One such method is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is comprised of service objectives, business terms, service relations, obligations and the possible action to be taken in the case of SLA violation. Most of the emphasis in the literature has, until now, been on the formation of meaningful SLAs by service consumers, through which their requirements will be met. However, in an increasingly competitive market based on the cloud environment, service providers too need a framework that will form a viable SLA, predict possible SLA violations before they occur, and generate early warning alarms that flag a potential lack of resources. This is because when a provider and a consumer commit to an SLA, the service provider is bound to reserve the agreed amount of resources for the entire period of that agreement – whether the consumer uses them or not. It is therefore very important for cloud providers to accurately predict the likely resource usage for a particular consumer and to formulate an appropriate SLA before finalizing an agreement. This problem is more important for a small to medium cloud service provider which has limited resources that must be utilized in the best possible way to generate maximum revenue. A viable SLA in cloud computing is one that intelligently helps the service provider to determine the amount of resources to offer to a requesting consumer, and there are number of studies on SLA management in the literature. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it presents a comprehensive overview of existing state-of-the-art SLA management approaches in cloud computing, and their features and shortcomings in creating viable SLAs from the service provider's viewpoint. From a thorough analysis, we observe that the lack of a viable SLA management framework renders a service provider unable to make wise decisions in forming an SLA, which could lead to service violations and violation penalties. To fill this gap, our second contribution is the proposal of the Optimized Personalized Viable SLA (OPV-SLA) framework which assists a service provider to form a viable SLA and start managing SLA violation before an SLA is formed and executed. The framework also assists a service provider to make an optimal decision in service formation and allocate the appropriate amount of marginal resources. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in forming viable SLAs through experiments. From the evaluative results, we observe that our framework helps a service provider to form viable SLAs and later to manage them to effectively minimize possible service violation and penalties

Aeronautical Engineering: A special bibliography with indexes, supplement 62

This bibliography lists 306 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in September 1975