Cloud computing provisions and allocates resources, in advance or real-time, to dynamic applications planned for execution. This is a challenging task as the Cloud-Service-Providers (CSPs) may not have sufficient resources at all times to satisfy the resource requests of the Cloud-Service-Users (CSUs). Further, the CSPs and CSUs have conflicting interests and may have different utilities. Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) negotiations among CSPs and CSUs can address these limitations. User Agents (UAs) negotiate for resources on behalf of the CSUs and help reduce the overall costs for the CSUs and enhance the resource utilization for the CSPs. This research proposes a broker-based mediation framework to optimize the SLA negotiation strategies between UAs and CSPs in Cloud environment. The impact of the proposed framework on utility, negotiation time, and request satisfaction are evaluated. The empirical results show that these strategies favor cooperative negotiation and achieve significantly higher utilities, higher satisfaction, and faster negotiation speed for all the entities involved in the negotiation.
