Business-driven management of differentiated services

Several intra- and inter-domain quality of service (QoS) provisioning mechanisms for IP networks have been researched and developed using Differentiated Services (DiffServ) technology. However, the incremental efforts needed to manage DiffServ networks from a business-oriented viewpoint have received relatively little attention. This paper addresses this gap and presents a framework for achieving business-driven QoS provisioning in DiffServ over MPLS networks. We provide a rich model of SLA and business indicators as well as reasonable mapping functions that define, with key degrees of importance, the impact of business indicators over service management policies. Business and service indicators are used to control static and dynamic admission of services. The paper advances the state of the art by considering the influence of business-level objectives on the policy refinement process. We evaluate and discuss the effectiveness of our approach through a simulation environment that we developed over OPNET.