Towards a Meta-Negotiation Architecture for SLA-Aware Grid Services

In novel market-oriented resource sharing models resource consumers pay for the resource usage and expect that non-functional requirements for the application execution, termed as Quality of Service (QoS), are satisfied. QoS is negotiated between two parties following the specific negotiation protocols and is recorded using Service Level Agreements (SLAs) standard. However, most of the existing work assumes that the communication partners know about the SLA negotiation protocols and about the SLA templates before entering the negotiation. However, this is a contradictory assumption, if we consider computational Grids and novel commercially oriented Computing Clouds where consumers and providers meet each other dynamically and on demand. In this paper we present novel meta-negotiation and SLA-mapping solutions for Grid workflows bridging the gap between current QoS models and Grid workflows, one of the most successful Grid programming paradigms. We illustrate the open research issues with a real world case study. Thereafter, we present document models for the specification of meta-negotiations and SLA-mappings. We discuss the architecture for the management of meta-negotiations and SLA-mappings as well as integration of the architecture into a Grid workflow management framework. General Terms Grid Computing, Distributed Computing, Service Level Agreements (SLAs)