A Contracting Protocol for Managing Quality of Service in a Multi-Provider Environment

The Internet as a global networking infrastructure offers a wide range of possibilities to trade E-Commerce services, goods, and digital content. A new form of E-Commerce service is the transmission of video streams on demand with specifications for the Quality of Service (QoS). The service of providing streamed information contains the reliable transmission of data from sender to receiver via several intermediate Internet Service Providers (ISP) that provide transport service for single data packets according to the QoS specifications. A big problem for reliable service provisioning is the lack of traffic prioritization mechanisms on today’s Internet and the fact that many ISPs as independent business entities are involved in delivering an E-Commerce service to the end-customer. Therefore, service contracts between service providers and service customers are proposed to manage QoS-based end-to-end service provisioning in a multi-provider environment. With the development and implementation of a contracting protocol, negotiation and settlement of service contracts between the business entities was realized to determine service level requirements and responsibilities for reliable service provisioning. VODCA was developed as a Video-on-Demand contracting architecture to manage QoS for streaming video based on negotiated service contracts.