A Flexible Policy Framework for the QoS Differentiated Provisioning of Services

We propose a policy-based framework for the QoS differentiated provisioning of services. The proposed frame-work improves the state-of-the-art in policy-based preference specification by combining cardinal and ordinal preferences. We describe the underlying models, focussing on the key features and contributions of the proposed framework. We also show how, using our framework, the QoS evaluation problem can be translated to a Constraint Satisfaction Problem while preserving the semantics of the preference policies.