Modelling End-to-end Quality-of-Service for Transaction-Based Services in Multi-Domain Environments

Next-generation service offerings will be increasingly based upon combining and integrating information from multiple logically and geographically distributed software systems, interconnected by communication networks. These systems and networks are owned by different administrative domains. For the commercial success of these services, it is important for service providers (SPs) to predict and control the end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) perceived by the end users. We focus on transaction-based services, such as E-business applications, for which control of end-to- end response and download times determine customer satisfaction. Today, no satisfactory solutions exist for the problem of realizing high and guaranteed end-to-end QoS for transaction-based services in multi-domain environments. In this paper, we propose a Service Level Agreement (SLA)-based approach to resolve this problem. To this end, we develop a quantitative performance modelling framework that incorporates SLAs. This enables SPs to determine the so-called SLA negotiation space, i.e. the set of combinations of per-domain SLAs that they need to negotiate with the other domain owners to deliver the desired end-to-end QoS.