ANALYZING NEGOTIATION TRENDS IN A QOS-AWARE MARKET OF SERVICES

It is well recognized that the provision of Service-Based Applications (SBAs) will be driven by market-oriented mechanisms, and that the market value of such applications will depend not only on their functionality, but also on the values of "quality of service" (QoS) parameters affecting their performance. These parameters usually refer to not static properties that may vary according to the provision strategies of providers, as well as to users demands. Automatic negotiation to select services for SBAs is a viable approach to satisfy users preferences on the application QoS values, but its adoption may result computationally expensive, so limiting its application to real service-based scenarios. In this paper, an empirical evaluation of negotiation trends in a simulated stochastic market of services is carried out, in order to identify negotiation parameters settings for which the communication overhead occurring among the involved negotiators can be compensated by an increased probability for the negotiation to succeed.