Affiliations 

  • 1 Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 2 School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
  • 3 Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada P6G 2M7
ScientificWorldJournal, 2014;2014:459375.
PMID: 24696645 DOI: 10.1155/2014/459375

Abstract

Cloud computing (CC) has recently been receiving tremendous attention from the IT industry and academic researchers. CC leverages its unique services to cloud customers in a pay-as-you-go, anytime, anywhere manner. Cloud services provide dynamically scalable services through the Internet on demand. Therefore, service provisioning plays a key role in CC. The cloud customer must be able to select appropriate services according to his or her needs. Several approaches have been proposed to solve the service selection problem, including multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). MCDA enables the user to choose from among a number of available choices. In this paper, we analyze the application of MCDA to service selection in CC. We identify and synthesize several MCDA techniques and provide a comprehensive analysis of this technology for general readers. In addition, we present a taxonomy derived from a survey of the current literature. Finally, we highlight several state-of-the-art practical aspects of MCDA implementation in cloud computing service selection. The contributions of this study are four-fold: (a) focusing on the state-of-the-art MCDA techniques, (b) highlighting the comparative analysis and suitability of several MCDA methods, (c) presenting a taxonomy through extensive literature review, and (d) analyzing and summarizing the cloud computing service selections in different scenarios.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.