Affiliations: Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart, Allmandring 30, 70550 Stuttgart | Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218 Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia
Abstract: This document presents an architecture for autonomous quality of service (QoS) management using a proxy-like approach. Service Level Agreements, as presented here, can be exploited to define certain QoS parameters that a service is to maintain during its interaction with a specific customer. As such, they provide a means of defining electronic contracts. Within this paper, a way is presented to autonomously manage such forms of contracts. Since this requires an accordingly designed framework, the relevant objectives that have to be respected in this context have been analysed. Most of these requirements are explicitly put forward by service providers, respectively customers and cover issues that such a framework ideally should support. On this basis, an architecture for a management system has been developed. The main innovation of this framework consists in the introduction of a third-party “proxy” that allows for easy, “plug’n’play” management of SLAs. Using the architecture, an implementation guideline has been sketched that will provide some insight into how such a system may be set up and reused. The proxy-like approach presented here has been critically analysed and possible improvements for further development and research in this area have been identified.
Keywords: Service Level Agreement (SLA), quality of service, SLA management, service oriented architecture, eBusiness, framework, proxy
