Monitoring for SLA compliance in customer edge network

Network usage monitoring is an important factor for companies and ISP's. Each company enters into an agreement with the ISP. This agreement is known as SLA (Service Level Agreement). This agreement, besides other administrative stuff, contains the traffic descriptors with limits and bounds for the customer. The ISP wants to know if the customer is abiding by the traffic limits. On the other hand, customer wants to find out if ISP is providing the service that the customer paid for. Customer would also like to know if lower limits can be set for the amount and class of traffic entering or leaving customer network. SLA's are there to provide fair services and costs to customers. SLA monitoring must be automated as manual monitoring is prone to errors and abrupt. In this paper, we define the SLA compliance and monitoring issues and develop an algorithm to monitor the bandwidth and other parameters of SLA with respect to customers and ISP vantage points.