SLA-Aware Provisioning for Revenue Maximization in Telecom Mesh Networks

Service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between the service provider (SP) and the customer. Among various parameters, SLA imposes penalties on the SP when the customer´s quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are violated. Hence, it is desirable to avoid SLA violations and such penalties. SLA also states the maximum amount of downtime a connection may tolerate during its lifetime. In this study, we present a dynamic provisioning scheme called Preemption-Oriented SLA-Aware Provisioning (POSAP) for telecom mesh networks, which considers a connection´s (1) availability requirements, (2) penalty, and (3) state. In addition to the connection´s various parameters (availability, penalty, etc.), the amount of affordable downtime is used as a metric to determine the risk of violating the connection´s SLA, and hence, its priority. Connection´s priority is denoted by urgency level. Our scheme allows resource preemption among connections, i.e., high-priority connections may preempt backup resources from low-priority connections. Also, new connection requests may preempt resources from existing connections. Urgency level determines how resources can be preempted. Our scheme is applied to a US-wide network. Our results show the improved performance in terms of (1) reduced SLA violations, (2) increased network utilization, and (3) increased network revenue, compared to a dedicated primary-backup (P-B) scheme.