Summary Each cloud service provider provides only an interface of its own cloud infrastructure for enabling clients to use its cloud resources. However, there is a number of difficulties for cloud providers to ensure proper functioning. One of the main problems of a cloud provider is the lack of resources to support a huge number of on‐demand resources provisioning. Thus, resources cannot be distributed among different cloud providers since the federation is not the basic operation of the cloud provider. The most efficient way to overcome this problem is to extend the interface's cloud provider with an automatic negotiation to dynamically form the best agreement between the different cloud providers based on the service level agreement. In this article, we propose an extension for the Open Cloud Computing Interface which is the standardized interface for the cloud computing to support the automatic negotiation between the different cloud providers. To prove the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach, we implement a prototype to evaluate the key presented in this article.

ABSTRACT The Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates the connectivity of billions of physical devices for exchanging information and enabling a wide range of applications. These applications can be presented in the form of dependent tasks, as outlined in a workflow. These workflows face limitations due to constraints in IoT sensors. To address these limitations, cloud computing has emerged to offer a large capacity of computing and storing with a great capability to adjust resources according to the need. However, cloud computing might not adequately meet the low‐latency of IoT workflow requirements when scheduling a workflow composed of IoT tasks due to its centralized nature. Moreover, cloud computing is not ideal for delay‐sensitive workflows and may increase communication costs. In response to these challenges, the use of fog computing as an extension to cloud computing scheme is recommended. Fog computing aims to process workflow tasks close to IoT devices. While fog computing offers various advantages, integrating these systems into workflow scheduling remains one of the most formidable challenges in distributed environments. Indeed, significant issues arise due to the timely execution and the resource limitations. In this survey paper, we present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the current state of the art in this domain. We propose a taxonomy to compare and evaluate the existing studies on workflow scheduling approaches in cloud–fog computing environments. This taxonomy encompasses various criteria, including scheduling techniques, performance metrics, workflow dependencies, scheduling policies, and evaluation tools. We highlight certain recommendations for open issues which require more investigations. Our aim is to provide valuable insights for researchers and developers interested in understanding the contributions and challenges of current workflow scheduling approaches in cloud–fog computing environments.

Negotiation is a decision-making process when the trading parties with conflicting aims pursue their own concerns. With the new advances of cloud technology compared with the traditional IT infrastructure, services such as discovery, elasticity and monitoring are automatically processed. In the same way, the negotiation service between clients and cloud providers can be difficult if it is performed manually. Clients need a service that allows them to negotiate automatically with the cloud providers on some parameters that are important for them. In this paper, we propose a generation process for ensuring the negotiation in the cloud environment and specifically for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) category. Our contributions in this paper include: (1) Designing a new proposal generation process based on factors affecting the negotiation between parties in the cloud, (2) Performing simulation experiments to evaluate our strategy and compare it with the other ones.

A cloud provider provides, on-demand, physical computing resources to clients. It enables clients to improve their computing delivered resources in virtual machines. However, the cloud provider faces major problems impacting its correct operation. One of these problems is that a cloud provider cannot deliver more resources when it has not enough resources during peak hours. Another problem related to providers is their inability to satisfy all client's requirements. In order to increase the reliability and the availability of cloud providers resources, we have proposed a distributed approach based on Contract Net Protocol (CNP) to overcome the limited resources problem. We have proposed also an extension for Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard to describe resources provisioning in cloud federation. This extension includes more information about the client, the provider identification and the quality of service. To prove the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach, we have suggested a real case study illustrating how a client can interact with our approach for the provision of two-tier web application. In addition to that, we have implemented a prototype to evaluate the key idea presented in this paper through a set of experiments.