Service Level Agreement Trading for the Differentiated Services Architectures Swiss Federal

Abstract-The differentiated services (DS) architecture provides a framework for the scalable provisioning of multiple service levels in the Internet. Its definition and initial work have concentrated mainly on per-hop behaviors (PHB) and mechanisms at each DS domain. Equally important is what happens between DS domains. Thanks to the flexibility of the architecture, it is the providers' choice how to interconnect with peers. In principle, traditional, static peering agreements work together with DS, but they do not offer the flexibility and dynamics needed in an electronic market for network capacity. Therefore, we look at dynamic service level agreements at the interdomain level. Such agreements are established by software entities called traders. These traders follow market-based principles to decide which contracts will be beneficial. In particular, traders compare the offers made by neighbor providers and select the most interesting ones. This selection of peer services creates competition among providers and integrates route selection based on service level and destination. We describe and implement a framework for service level agreement trading. We show the basic workings and first performance results of SLA trading using specific traders and an experimentally defined PHB in a simulation environment