Towards MCDA method based service broker for SLA selection in IMS environment

The success of telecom operators is based on several criteria including but not limited to the diversity of services. The competition between operators is needed to improve and ensure customers loyalty by providing interesting services. For this purpose IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) has been a major work effort of the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standards bodies for several years now. However choosing the service that best meets the customer's needs proves complicated due to the wide variety of service providers. We propose in this paper a Service Broker for IMS services' selection based on Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) method to select efficiently the best IMS service requested, and manage the SLA (Service Level Agreement) between the different entities. A context based SLA contract ontology in IMS network is also proposed to provide users with a clear model to express their requirements and preferences.