An analytical model of the service provisioning time within the harmony network service plane

Grid computing aims at offering standardized access to heterogeneous and distributed resources for scientific communities. However, in order to support emerging next generation Grid applications with specific Quality of Service requirements, the interconnecting networks have also been considered as first-class allocable Grid resources and have been also taken into account for the co-scheduling process. In the last few years, a number of network resource provisioning systems were developed, however, without providing specific analysis on the scalability of potential architectural design alternatives. Our approach is to formulate a fundamental analytical model to evaluate the expected service provisioning time using different architectures as a function of the involved transport domains. To validate our results, we have used measurements obtained from the European IST-FP6 Phosphorus project testbed. The main contribution is to provide an instrument to obtain reference values to support architectural design decisions even in an early stage of the development phase.