A Collaborative Approach to Predicting Service Price for QoS-Aware Service Selection

In QoS-aware service selection, a service requester seeks to maximize its utility by selecting a service provider that charges the lowest service price while meeting the requester's QoS requirements. In existing selection approaches, a service requester focuses on finding providers based on their QoS and thereby ignores their service prices that could change with their QoS. High QoS may provide more benefits, but may require a high service price. As a result, the highest QoS may not produce the maximum utility. A service requester and candidate service providers have a conflicting interest over service prices. Since a provider would not reveal its minimum acceptable price, it is important for a requester to predict the minimum price for a service that meets its QoS requirements. We propose a collaborative approach to predicting a provider's minimum price for a desired QoS based on prior usage experience. The experimental results show our approach can find the optimal service providers efficiently and effectively.