Proactive management of SLA violations by capturing relevant external events in a Cloud of Things environment

The cloud of things (CoT) is an emerging paradigm that has merged and combined cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). Such a paradigm has enabled service providers to provide on-demand computing resources from devices spread across different locations for service users to be dynamically connected to them. While this benefits the CoT service providers and users in many ways, it also brings a key challenge of ensuring that the service is delivered according to the promised quality. Failure to ensure this will result in the service provider experiencing penalties of different types and the service user experiencing disruptions. The literature addresses this problem by proactively managing for SLA violations. However, given the geographically dispersed region of a formed CoT service, in this paper we argue that for proactive SLA violation identification, we need specialized techniques that also consider events that are outside the usual control of service providers and users, but will impact the CoT environment and the quality of service. We propose a framework that identifies such external events of interest and ascertains their impact on achieving the service according to the promised quality. We explain the working of our proposed framework in detail and demonstrate its superiority in proactively determining SLA violations as compared to existing approaches.