Service Negotiation Research Articles

Cloud Service Negotiation in Internet of Things Environment: A Mixed Approach

Internet of Things (IoT) allows connected objects to communicate via the Internet. IoT can benefit from the unlimited capabilities and resources of cloud computing. Also, when coupled with IoT, cloud computing can in turn deal with real world things in a more distributed and dynamic manner. As the cloud market becomes more open and competitive, Quality of Service (QoS) will be more important. However, cloud providers and cloud consumers have different, and sometimes opposite, preferences. If such a conflict occurs, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) cannot be reached without negotiation. A tradeoff negotiation approach can outperform a concession approach in terms of utility, but may incur more failures if information is incomplete. To balance utility and success rate, we propose a mixed approach for cloud service negotiation, which is based on the “game of chicken.” In particular, if one is uncertain about the strategy of its counterpart, it is best to mix concession and tradeoff strategies in negotiation. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive simulations. Results show that a mixed negotiation approach can achieve a higher utility than a concession approach, while incurring fewer failures than a tradeoff approach.

How to Design Trade Agreements in Services: Top Down or Bottom-Up?

This article deals with claims, recently raised in various circles, that structural faults in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have prevented WTO Members from advancing services liberalization under the Agreement. The GATS is generally associated in this context with a bottom-up (positive-list) scheduling approach where the sectors on which trade commitments are undertaken are selected individually. This is claimed to be less efficient, in terms of liberalization effects, than alternative approaches under which everything is considered to be fully committed unless specifically excluded (top-down or negative listing). However, a closer look at services negotiations conducted in various settings, including the Doha Round process, WTO accession cases and different types of Regional Trade Agreements (RTA), suggests that such structural issues have limited, if any, impact on the results achieved. What ultimately matters are not negotiating or scheduling techniques, but the political impetus that the governments concerned are ready to generate.

A Study on the Korea-China FTA Service Negotiation Strategies: Focused on the Implications from China-Hong Kong Cepa Service Concessions

This study analyzes China’s service concessions under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as well as the service concessions included in the FTAs that China has signed so far, including the CEPA with Hong Kong. The objective is to determine the extent to which the Chinese service sector is opened and to derive implications for the Korea-China FTA negotiations over services. 1. China-Hong Kong CEPA and Korea-China FTA2. Negotiation Process and Features of the China-Hong Kong CEPAA. Annual Supplementary AgreementsB. Guangdong as the Pilot Basis for the CEPAC. Comparing the CEPA to the ECFA3. China’s Service Concessions in the CEPA4. Implications of the CEPA for the Korea-China FTA A. Examples of Designing Service con-cessions from China-Hong Kong CEPAB. Strategic Suggestions for the Korea-China FTA Service NegotiationC. Possible Service Sectors to be Opened in the Korea-China FTA

Performance of E2E service negotiation models in the next generation internet

Evolution towards the next-generation Internet assumes dynamic end-to-end (E2E) quality of service negotiation on the path between the two providers, which are interconnected by a number of transit providers. Negotiation is performed by means of an appropriate signaling protocol. Basic models for E2E service negotiation include: (1) the cascade model, which assumes that a single provider controls service negotiation on the path, and (2) the third-party (3P) model, in which the trusted intermediary performs service negotiation on behalf of all domains on the path. This article presents a comparative study of the aforementioned negotiation models, regarding transport of signaling traffic. The three realistic topologies of interconnected networks have been simulated, using the network simulator NS2. Particularly, we point out the applicability and deployment of the 3P model.

Analysis of Linkages among Organizations Involved in Agricultural and Rural Development of Ogba Area in Rivers State , Nigeria

The study examined areas of linkage existing among public and private organizations involved in agricultural and rural development programmes in Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni areas of Rivers State. Thirty Agricultural Extension Agents (EAs) participated in the study and questionnaire was employed to elicit information from them. Percentages and mean scores were utilized for data analysis. The study found that inter-organisational linkages existed among the three agencies (RISADEP, NAOC and ELF) involved in agricultural and rural development in the study area with common focus of helping to raise the standard of living and conditions of farmers and the people. The major areas of relationship of the development agencies include: periodic joint workshop, training programmes and extension fairs; teaching of improved agricultural production, processing and storage practices; collaborative negotiation and provision of infrastructure and social services; joint diagnosis and solution of field problems; joint supervision and evaluation of extension activities, among others. The study, however, identified certain constraints to effective linkages among the organizations. To strengthen and sustain organizational linkages among the agencies, increased funding of development activities, massive community enlightenment programmes, adequate work incentives and high prioritization of agency linkage system are paramount.

Self-organized service negotiation for collaborative decision making.

This paper proposes a self-organized service negotiation method for CDM in intelligent and automatic manners. It mainly includes three phases: semantic-based capacity evaluation for the CDM sponsor, trust computation of the CDM organization, and negotiation selection of the decision-making service provider (DMSP). In the first phase, the CDM sponsor produces the formal semantic description of the complex decision task for DMSP and computes the capacity evaluation values according to participator instructions from different DMSPs. In the second phase, a novel trust computation approach is presented to compute the subjective belief value, the objective reputation value, and the recommended trust value. And in the third phase, based on the capacity evaluation and trust computation, a negotiation mechanism is given to efficiently implement the service selection. The simulation experiment results show that our self-organized service negotiation method is feasible and effective for CDM.

Bridging the Gap between the Ideal and Reality: Services Liberalisation in the China – Japan – South Korea Free Trade Agreement

This paper argues that services sectors cannot be overlooked in the ongoing negotiations of the China–Japan–South Korea free trade agreement (CJK FTA) given the ever-increasing significance of services liberalisation, both in global and in regional trade. The present paper maintains that in order to avoid the benefits generated by the CJK FTA from being diluted by other FTA initiatives that involve Asia-Pacific countries, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with the United States (US) in the lead, CJK FTA negotiators should strive to design a high-quality framework for services liberalisation. This paper first analyses the reality of the services industry and trade in these three countries. Then, it discusses why the three sides should pursue highquality services liberalisation in the CJK FTA. Thereafter, the paper focuses on the key aspects of services negotiations such as market access, scheduling method, regulatory disciplines and reform, and then puts forward suggestions for bridging the gap between the ideal state of services liberalisation and the reality faced by the three parties. The TPP, TTIP, TiSA, US-South Korea FTA, and other recent developments are also given due consideration in proposing possible solutions.

Cloud service negotiation: a research report

As the cloud market becomes more open and competitive, Quality of Service (QoS) will be more important. To allow cloud consumers to express their QoS requirements, and negotiate them with cloud providers, we argue for cloud service negotiation. This paper outlines a research roadmap, reviews the state of the art and reports our work on cloud service negotiation. Three research problems that we formulate are QoS measurement, QoS negotiation and QoS assurance. To address QoS measurement, we initiate a quality model for cloud services, called CLOUDQUAL, which specifies six quality dimensions and five quality metrics. To address QoS negotiation, we present a mixed negotiation approach for cloud services, which is based on the ‘game of chicken’ and can balance utility and success rate. To address QoS assurance, we propose a QoS-driven resource allocation method for cloud services, which can meet users’ QoS requirements while minimising resources consumed.

What do clients expect of community care and what are their needs? The Community care for the Elderly: Needs and Service Use Study (CENSUS)

To investigate the relationship between objectively assessed care needs and expectations for care of older people and their carers, before commencement of community care services. Cross-sectional research on 55 community-dwelling older adults and carers, recruited after receiving approval for government-subsidised community care services. Care needs and expectations of care were assessed at interview. Participants' and carers' expectations for their pending community care package did not correspond with unmet participant needs. Instead, expectations corresponded with met needs, that is those for which they already received help, with the exception of expectations of domestic support and personal care. Participants' unmet needs were predominantly in social and recreational activities, eating, and physical and mental health. As community care in Australia becomes consumer-directed by 2015, care services will need to empower clients and carers through education about their needs and available services, as part of the assessment and service negotiation process.

How to Design Trade Agreements in Services: Top Down or Bottom Up?

This paper deals with claims, recently raised in various circles, that structural faults in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have prevented WTO Members from advancing services liberalization under the Agreement. The GATS is generally associated in this context with a bottom-up (positive-list) scheduling approach where the sectors on which trade commitments are undertaken are selected individually. This is claimed to be less efficient, in terms of liberalization effects, than alternative approaches under which everything is considered to be fully committed unless specifically excluded (top-down or negative listing). However, a closer look at services negotiations conducted in various settings, including the Doha-Round process, WTO accession cases and different types of regional trade agreements, suggests that such structural issues have limited, if any, impact on the results achieved. What ultimately matters are not negotiating or scheduling techniques, but the political impetus that the governments concerned are ready to generate.

Definition of Trade in Services: A Critical Analysis

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is a relatively new agreement. It entered into force in January 1995 as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations to provide for the extension of the multilateral trading system to services. With a view to achieving a progressively higher level of liberalization, pursuant to Article XIX of the GATS, WTO Members are committed to entering into further rounds of services negotiations. The first such round started in January 2000. The definition of services trade under the GATS is four-pronged, depending on the territorial presence of the supplier and the consumer at the time of the transaction. International trade in services is defined by the Four Modes of Supply of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). (Mode 1) Cross border trade, which is defined as delivery of a service from the territory of one country into the territory of other country; (Mode 2) Consumption abroad - this mode covers supply of a service of one country to the service consumer of any other country; (Mode 3) Commercial presence - which covers services provided by a service supplier of one country in the territory of any other country, and (Mode 4) Presence of natural persons - which covers services provided by a service supplier of one country through the presence of natural persons in the territory of any other country. The present paper critically examines these four modes of supply and evaluates the merits of the definition of services contained in the GATS Agreement.

A Study on the Financial Service Negotiations in the Korean-Chinese Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) with Respect to RMB Internationalization

A Study on the Financial Service Negotiations in the Korean-Chinese Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) with Respect to RMB Internationalization

The Doha Round and the Future Architecture of the Multilateral Regulation of Trade in Services

At the multilateral level, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) regulates trade in services. Considered a framework agreement, GATS contains a built-in negotiation mandate to further develop disciplines on services trade. These negotiations have, in the context of the Doha Round, been going on since 2001. Although nowhere near conclusion, a potential deal on trade in services is likely to have a substantial impact on the architecture of GATS. This paper analyses the Doha Round services negotiations in order to provide an insight into these possible changes. It first addresses the two parallel tracks on which the services negotiations are being conducted. The first track consists of multilateral negotiations on domestic regulation, emergency safeguards, government procurement and subsidies. The second track involves a bi- or plurilateral request-offer approach on market access. Subsequently, the paper focuses on a ‘third track’ of service negotiations, comprised of talks on electronic commerce and on modalities for least-developed countries. Lastly, the negotiations on the plurilateral international services agreement are addressed. The paper concludes that, while the different subjects require different solutions, plurilateral negotiations within the multilateral framework might be an, albeit difficult, way forward in unblocking the multilateral stalemate.

Determinants of Services Trade Agreements: Regulatory Incidence and Convergence

Given the rise of services preferentialism in the last decade and the importance of domestic regulation for services trade, this paper examines the role of regulatory incidence and convergence as determinants of services trade agreements (STAs). Our results suggest that regulation is an important determinant of STA membership. They also suggest that geography, common institutions and pre-existing trade matter more than economic size and factor endowments for addressing regulatory incidence and convergence in services negotiations. Finally, we find that countries displaying greater regulatory convergence and less restrictive regulation are also more likely candidates for reciprocal services liberalization.

A semantic approach for QoS specification of communication services using QoE parameters

Abstract Various operations related to Quality of Service (QoS) management in communication networks require the clients/users to specify the quality level of the network service. The current QoS proposals adopt a fixed set of performance parameters at the network level to specify quality levels, avoiding dealing with the problem of heterogeneity among QoS parameters and metrics during the service management. However, in several situations where humans are the end-users of the service, the quality level should be specified using Quality of Experience (QoE) parameters, more natural for humans than network performance parameters. On the other hand, the QoS specification using QoE parameters is not sufficient to the service providers; they must translate QoE parameters into network parameters. This paper proposes a semantic approach to the automatic QoE/QoS mapping using the Network QoS Ontology (NetQoSOnt), offering automatic and extensible translation between QoE and QoS parameters. The use of our proposal is illustrated by supporting a voice over IP service negotiation.

Prospects for Services Trade Negotiations

Trade and investment in services are diffi cult to measure, and the regulatory barriers that inhibit the free fl ow of services are hard to quantify. As a result, very little attention has been paid to dismantling barriers to services trade and investment in free trade negotiations. Th is paper examines what has been achieved in both regional and multilateral compacts by surveying international precedents involving Asian countries which have included services trade reforms. We then assess the prospects for services trade negotiations and explore how services trade negotiations could be pursued over the next decade through two distinct channels: the Trans-Pacifi c Partnership (TPP) and a plurilateral approach among groups of WTO countries. We fi nd that in the case of developing Asia, free trade agreements have largely excluded services or have only committed to “lock in” current practices in a narrow subset of service sectors. Th is is also the case in agreements negotiated between developing countries, which have produced less substantial commitments to liberalize services than those negotiated between developing and developed countries. Multilateral negotiations on services have also underperformed, as substantive negotiations on services in the Doha Round never really got underway. We advocate a stronger eff ort by developing Asian countries to prioritize services negotiations in their regional arrangements, and to expand coverage of services in those pacts to a broad range of infrastructure services that are included in other FTAs in force or under construction in the Asia-Pacifi c region.

Communication Issues for Small and Medium Enterprises

This article considers communication issues for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from both provider and customer perspectives. SME communication infrastructure at the individual site should usually be built around Ethernet-based local area network with a remotely manageable integrated access device that enables high speed Internet access, virtual private networking, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality and collaborative services. The authors further address several open quality of service (QoS) issues that include: service level agreements, signaling for quality of service and management aspects. The proposed framework for service management encompasses interfaces for QoS-aware and legacy applications, generic service level specification, functional model of service negotiation and management policies.

Regulation, trust and contractual incentives around transport contracts – Is there anything bus operators can learn from public air service contracts?

This paper compares recent experiences in contract negotiation and subsequent commitment in public air services with the bus industry. The heart of the paper is a survey of European and Australian regional airlines, which we mirror with revealed experiences of bus operators. We aim to identify a number of elements in the contracting regimes that have exposed ambiguity and significant gaps in what the principal (e.g., transport department) expected, and what the agent (airline or bus operator) believed they were obliged to deliver. Ultimately airline and bus services are similar in that public authorities procure transport services that are desirable for the society but would be unprofitable without government involvement. In both sectors (theoretically fairly similar) public transport contracts are used, and those usually include obligations and performance measurements. In terms of similarities, one of the surveyed contract details that had a perceived high clarity in both industries was “payment procedures” and amongst those with rather poor clarity was also in both industries “incentives to improve performance and grow patronage”. We also show differences between regional air services and bus operations with regard to performance measurement and pre-specified obligations. Because of the strong safety culture around air services we find that regulation and trusting partnerships are even more important to aviation than to the bus sector. Because of the high level of trust but also because of simpler and more complete contracts in aviation, there is much less (re-)negotiation going on compared to the bus operations.

Proceso de negociación de calidad del servicio en una arquitectura NGN

La provisión de Calidad de Servicio (QoS, Quality of Service) es uno de los aspectos más importantes en el desarrollo de la Red de Nueva Generación (NGN, Next Generation Network). En este sentido, el suministro de QoS en redes basadas en IP, requiere de un proceso de negociación en el que se deben identificar los protocolos e interfaces necesarias para establecer de forma clara los procedimientos a ejecutar entre los elementos y funciones involucrados. Este artículo describe el proceso de negociación de calidad del servicio en el contexto de la NGN, donde el usuario, la capa de transporte y la capa de servicio acuerdan los parámetros de QoS de la sesión que se va a establecer para lograr un servicio con calidad.

India and the Services Negotiations in the Doha Round

This paper discusses India’s negotiating position in services in the Doha Round, the recent developments in this Round and its implications for India. The paper shows that services sector is a key component of India’s trade and FDI inflows. India is a major proponent of liberalizing Modes 1 and 4 and sectors such as computer related services. The paper argues that it is in India’s interest to push for a successful conclusion of the Doha Round. It suggests various measures such as forming consensus among developing countries and implement domestic reforms, which can help India to push forward the negotiations and benefit from it.