An approach to inter-provider quality of service negotiation in NGN

This paper presents an overview of the authors' recent research work regarding end-to-end quality of service provisioning in next generation networks. Service level agreement is considered as a basis for service negotiation and management. We discuss the main features of the two basic service negotiation models, namely the bilateral model and the third party model. We argue that the third party model is more suitable for the next generation network environment. Starting from a functional model of the third party entity, an efficient algorithm for per-domain class selection has been presented and evaluated by simulation. Simulation tool has been developed in a form of an object-oriented application for management of service level agreements. Simulation results have verified the benefits of our approach in the sense of fairness, flexibility, adaptability and reduction of the implementation complexity.