Service level agreement trading for the differentiated services architectures

Bandwidth brokers as proposed in the diffserv framework build on the process of setting up Service Level Agreements (SLA). This is a very static procedure, usually performed manually and based only on a simple description of the SLA. However, diffserv is suited to handle a more dynamic environment and to provide more than connectivity with its service classes. Our proposal enhances bandwidth brokers by including more significant information in SLAs such as the flow’s destination network and pricing. In addition, we present a new per-hop behavior that supports flexible allocation of code points which is important to our approach. The system is targeted at large ISPs with good inter-connectivity. We implemented it on top of a flow-based simulation engine. The evaluation is based on parts of the current AS topology and characteristics of aggregated traffic. The results show an improvement of network utilization by up to 40% over a traditional, shortest-path routed inter-domain network for a wide range of network and traffic parameters