A novel mechanism for provisioning of high-level quality of service information in grid environments

Grids, like other heterogeneous systems, have reached the level of maturity where they are addressing the Quality of Service (QoS) provision aspect as a fundamental part of their architecture. However, due to the multi-layer nature of these environments, the QoS characteristics of the infrastructure are revealed to the service-consumer through a complex procedure, in which each layer maps its own QoS parameters to another. Most of these approaches are starting the delegation of QoS information from the service provider’s side, resulting in delivering low-level terms to the service consumer. In this paper, we define the architecture of a mechanism that is able to provide application-oriented and user-specific QoS information in the internal layers of the Grid middleware. This way, it enables the service consumer and especially the end-user to express his business perspectives through the service level agreement life cycle. We also demonstrate the operation of this mechanism and evaluate its performance using a specific Grid scenario. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.