Architecture for Modeling Services and Creation of a Service Level Agreement by Using XML Technologies

Abstract

The constantly growing usage of the Internet and the need for deployment of value added IP services has yielded a thorough investigation for the modeling of these services and a dynamic model for the subscription to these services. This procedure will result in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The dynamic use of SLAs is imperative in order to provide services with guaranteed quality of service. SLA is a legal service contract between a customer and a service provider that specifies the forwarding service a customer should receive. This contract includes levels of availability, service ability, performance, operation and other attributes of the service. By the proposed architecture, the ISP offers the customer an automated manner to specify the services and their characteristics he wishes to be subscribed. This model reduces the operational cost of an ISP and the time needed for a customer to request and access services. This paper focused on the specification of an open architecture for modeling services and creation of Service Level Agreements with the use of XML techniques. The novelty of the proposed approach is to provide the customer with means in order to specify, select and negotiate the characteristics of added value service in IP networks in an effective and simple way.