Hierarchical trust estimation framework for infrastructure based cloud service selection using fuzzy Multi objective optimization methods

Abstract

Distributed systems, or distributed computing, has spawned many familiar technologies across the years, including Grid Computing, Utility Computing, Cloud Computing, application service provision (ASP) andWeb 2.0. Among these, Cloud Computing is a specialized form in which the underlying resources, such as storage, processors, and memory, are completely abstracted from the consumer. It has emerged as a paradigm to provide on demand resources to the customers, which may include access to infrastructure / application services on a subscription basis. Cloud Service Provider (CSP) facilitates many types of services among which Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are the basic types. Consumers utilize these services to simplify application utilization, store, share, and protect content. The number of CSPs who offer computing as a utility has increased rapidly in the recent years providing more options for the customers to choose from. This rapid growth of public cloud offerings allows the customers to interact with unknown service providers to carry out tasks or transactions. In such a scenario, a rating or a ranking system could help them to choose between the services as per their requirement. If an appropriate service provider is not selected, serious problems such as low-quality services and service nonfulfillment may occur. Therefore service levels of different CSPs need to be evaluated in an objective way to ensure quality, reliability and security of an application. The evaluation and selection of cloud service is a multi-criteria problem, which includes many intangible factors that are difficult to measure. For example, choice of service provider based on infrastructure facilities would be governed by a number of factors like cost, location of the server, reliability, level of security, storage availability, easeness etc..