Engineering for quality of service

Important factors that will determine the success of the players in the competitive communications market of the future are efficient service creation and deployment, and quality of service (QoS). We present an approach to service creation and QoS handling that is followed by the ACTS project (AC227) SCREEN. In particular we identify two general problem classes that should be tackled by the service developer, in the context of QoS handling. The first problem class is concerned with the derivation of the adequate service logic that will capture and negotiate the required QoS levels, during service execution. The second problem class is concerned with the translation of QoS requirements into performance requirements of service components, and subsequently, with the deployment of the service components on the DPE. We go on to specify promising solutions related to the first problem class, that are based on the definition of component contract offers and negotiation.