Design of an SLA-Driven QoS Management Platform for Provisioning Multimedia Personalized Services

In this paper, we present an SLA-driven QoS Management Platform which establishes service level agreement between the service provider and the customers before the service delivery and manages the distributed resources efficiently to support QoS-aware multimedia personalized services (MPS) over large scale networks. Based on service oriented architecture, such a QoS management platform consists of SLA negotiation, QoS management and resource management. The QoS management connects the SLA negotiation and resource management to real-time monitor QoS and adapt the quality levels to cope with the varying network conditions. Such a QoS management platform allows clients to specify the QoS requirements, and enables service providers to offer different QoS levels, negotiate with their customers on the possible quality levels and adapt the resources allocation to optimize the system overall performance. We constructed a prototype system and study the QoS management in both static and dynamic service modes. Experiments are conducted to examine the system communication overhead caused by the SLA communication, and system performance by integrating various strategies for QoS management. The results show that our proposed SLA-driven QoS management platform is highly flexible, extensible and efficient to support QoS-aware MPS over large scale networks.