Agreement signalling and network service provisioning for grids

Resource-sharing is one of the grid intrinsic properties enabling efficient usage of services by clients from many virtual organizations. This is particularly true for network infrastructures, which are typically designed to serve a large number of heterogeneous users. In such an environment, the support of network quality of service requires the establishment of service level agreements between users and network service providers, admission control as well as network control planes for automatic or semi-automatic service provisioning. The availability of guarantees allows flexible usage of the distributed infrastructure and enables application-controllable performance. Nevertheless, many network providers today only offer best-effort services and do not support service level agreement signalling. In this paper we analyze requirements and introduce two bandwidth-oriented services for enhanced grid data transfer: the guaranteed delivery file transfer and virtual leased line services. We propose a complete architecture - fully integrated with grid middleware - for network service level agreement management and inter-domain network service provisioning. This is based on the functional division into agreement and service provider layers proposed by the Grid Resource Allocation and Agreement Protocol working group of the Global Grid Forum.