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Keywords
Service levels, Service quality, Information technology, Internet
Abstract
Internet services are being deployed over an infrastructure that involves co-operation between multiple organizations and systems. This has necessitated the need for standard means to share the information between the service providers and their customers. This information essentially pertains to the service level obligations between the service provider and their customers so that the customers can ensure the quality of service (QoS) that they are able to achieve at their end. A service level agreement (SLA) essentially quantifies the level of service as it includes the metrics that define the quality of service. The research undertaken identifies the QoS dimensions, which are required to define the multimedia services. Each application used by the user will involve different values of the QoS dimensions in order to maintain an expected level of service. The QoS requirement for a particular application will also depend upon the provisioning of the network resources depending on the client and server side CPU and memory available for processing. The relationship between the system resources, QoS dimensions and the SLA has been depicted in the form of a general model of SLA and as an example taken for the video conferencing application.
Introduction
A service level agreement (SLA) is a formal definition of the relationship that exists between two organizations, usually between a supplier of services and its customer. SLAs are gaining importance in five major ways:
1 Increasing role of outsourcing services. The increasing dependence of a company's success on IT infrastructures requires facing the challenges of service quality. The complexity of the needed IT services is growing; therefore, in order to concentrate on their core businesses the companies are outsourcing their needs to network service providers. At the same time, the companies also want to have a sufficient amount of control over the quality of service provided to them by different service providers. Hence, both the client company and the service provider sign a service level agreement in which the functionality of the service and the required service level is defined by means of the QoS parameters.
2 Defines the standards of quality of service (QoS) provided. Quality of service represents the configuration and operation of network elements...