OPTCLOUD: An Optimal Cloud Service Selection Framework Using QoS Correlation Lens

Cloud computing has grown as a computing paradigm in the last few years. Due to the explosive increase in the number of cloud services, QoS (quality of service) becomes an important factor in service filtering. Moreover, it becomes a nontrivial problem when comparing the functionality of cloud services with different performance metrics. Therefore, optimal cloud service selection is quite challenging and extremely important for users. In the existing approaches of cloud service selection, the user's preferences are offered by the user in a quantitative form. With fuzziness and subjectivity, it is a hurdle task for users to express clear preferences. Moreover, many QoS attributes are not independent but interrelated; therefore, the existing weighted summation method cannot accommodate correlations among QoS attributes and produces inaccurate results. To resolve this problem, we propose a cloud service framework that takes the user's preferences and chooses the optimal cloud service based on the user's QoS constraints. We propose a cloud service selection algorithm, based on principal component analysis (PCA) and the best-worst method (BWM), which eliminates the correlations between QoS and provides the best cloud services with the best QoS values for users. In the end, a numerical example is shown to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed methodology.