Service level agreements for DiffServ-based services' provisioning

The evolution of mechanisms for providing Quality-of-Service (QoS) over the contemporary network infrastructures has introduced the need for regulation and management of the emerging QoS services with the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs define the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the services provided from a network provider to peering networks or customers. In this work, we define a template for the SLA structure to support the provision of a QoS service between two peering domains and then we proceed with the definition of an end-to-end SLA across consecutive domains, based on the bilateral ones. We also propose a model for the service provisioning procedures. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.