Traffic Engineering and Control for the Management of Service Level Agreements in Packet Networks

The talk considers templates for QoS-centered Service Level Agreements (SLA), and a framework for their real time management in multiservice packet n networks. The SLAs are for QoS-assured delivery of aggregate bandwidth from ingress to egress nodes, where the elementary entities are flows or calls of various QoS classes. A SLA monitoring scheme is presented in which revenue is generated by the admission of flows into the network, and penalty incurred when flows are lost in periods when the service provider is not SLA-compliant. In the SLA management scheme proposed here the results of a prior design are used, in conjunction with measurements taken locally at ingress nodes, to classify the loading status of routes as either undersubscribed or oversubscribed.