Novel Methods For Determining QoS Parameters and Thresholds in End user’s Service Level Agreement

Abstract

Service level agreement (SLA) is a powerful tool to formalize the negotiation and agreement between the service provider and service seeker with the scope of service quality characteristics, compensations and tariffs. The service quality description is one the main parts of a SLA which can be characterized by the use of suitable and feasible quality of service (QoS) parameters. Determining suitable QoSparameters is the most important step in SLA codification. In this paper, we propose a novel method for determining the most related QoS parameters for characterizing the service quality in a SLA. The proposed method is a step-by-step algorithm which is based on selecting feasible parameters among a general initial list obtained from international references. The criteria for feasibility are perceivability and measurability from the end user’s viewpoint. Our method is general and can be applied to each service. We also leverage on clustering algorithm to prioritize the feasible QoS parameters according to their popularity in international studies. Finally, we propose a statistical method to determine the threshold for the feasible parameters. We provide an interval for each threshold. We show the steps of our proposed methods via a case study as the final part of the paper.