Service replication becomes the area of interest for many providers as it can be utilized to improve both performance and availability of their own services. With the increasing number of consumers, the providers are obligated to maintain the service responsiveness (i.e. Performance and availability) with respect to the signed Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the provider and consumers. In...

This paper presents a dynamic Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation scheme between peer autonomous systems (ASes) that implement DiffServ per domain behaviors. For concreteness, we tailor our scheme to account for the needs of VoIP transport across multiple ASes. We present a heuristic but computationally simple and distributed scheme that uses traffic statistics to forecast the near-future...

Cloud computing system promises to offer subscription oriented computing services to users worldwide. Cloud computing has been envisioned as the next-generation architecture of IT enterprise. In contrast to traditional solutions, where the IT services are under proper physical, logical and personnel controls, cloud computing moves the application software and databases to the large data centers...

Recent work on Bandwidth Brokers focuses mainly on service provisioning between peer ISPs. Although routing and pricing issues are also important aspects of a contract between ASes (autonomous systems) they are usually not treated as an integral part of Bandwidth brokers. Adding these features to a Bandwidth Broker can transform a simple negotiation into a market-like process. In this paper we ...

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a business operations concept that is sometimes inappropriately applied to engineering development. When an SLA is not converted to engineering requirements, development occurs blindly and testing is probably done against some of the values specified in the SLA. The result is higher risk and higher cost. This paper illustrates some concepts concerning data com...

Quality-of-service and SLA guarantees are among the major challenges of cloud-based services. In this paper we first present a new cloud model called SLAaaS – SLA aware Service. SLAaaS considers QoS levels and SLA as first class citizens of cloud-based services. This model is orthogonal to other SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS cloud models, and may apply to any of them. More specifically we make three con...

The advent of information and communication technology has changed the nature of business-to-business interaction among organizations. The use of electronic contracts with automated support for their management allows an increase of effectiveness and efficiency in contract processing, opening new possibilities for interaction among parties. Service Providers and their customers negotiate utilit...

In response to the global economic crisis, organizations are cutting costs and focusing on core competencies. One natural corollary of this situation has been an increased interest in the outsourcing of IT services. Such sourcing relationships are established and maintained via formally negotiated IT service level agreements (SLAs), the goal of which is to generate utility for both parties. Und...

By leveraging the Internet, cloud computing allows users to have on-demand access large pools of configurable resources. PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure and SaaS (Software Service) are three basic categories for services provided by environments. Quality service (QoS) metrics like reliability, availability, performance, cost determine which resources available in scenario. Pr...

This paper is about the role of a heuristic algorithm for load balancing that can be incorporated in Multi-Protocol Label Switching/ Differentiated Services (MPLS/DS) networks based on self-management principles for automated traffic configuration. Delivery of Quality of Services (QoS) differentiation according to specific service level agreements, Service Level Agreement (SLA), has to be in re...