Management of Service Level Agreements for Cloud Services in IoT: A Systematic Mapping Study

Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are computing technologies that provide services to consumers and businesses, allowing organizations to become more agile and flexible. Therefore, ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for such cloud-based services is crucial for both the service providers and service consumers. As SLAs are critical for cloud deployments and wider adoption of cloud services, the management of SLAs in cloud and IoT has thus become an important and essential aspect. This paper investigates the existing research on the management of SLAs in IoT applications that are based on cloud services. For this purpose, a Systematic Mapping study (a well-defined method) is conducted to identify the published research results that are relevant to SLAs. The paper identifies 328 primary studies and categorizes them into seven main technical classifications: SLA management, SLA definition, SLA modeling, SLA negotiation, SLA monitoring, SLA violation and trustworthiness, and SLA evolution. The paper also summarizes the research types, research contributions, and demographic information in these studies. The evaluation of the results show that most of the approaches for managing SLAs are applied in academic or controlled experiments with limited industrial settings rather than in real industrial environments. Many studies focus on proposal models and methods to manage SLAs, and there is a lack of focus on the evolution perspective and a lack of adequate tool support to facilitate practitioners in their SLA management activities. Moreover, the scarce number of studies focusing on concrete metrics for qualitative or quantitative assessment of QoS in SLAs urges the need for in-depth research on metrics definition and measurements for SLAs.