5G & SLAs: Automated proposition and management of agreements towards QoS enforcement

Abstract

Efficient Service Level Agreements (SLA) management and anticipation of Service Level Objectives (SLO) breaches become mandatory to guarantee the required service quality in software-defined and 5G networks. To create an operational Network Service, it is highly envisaged to associate it with their network-related parameters that reflect the corresponding quality levels. These are included in policies but while SLAs target usually business users, there is a challenge for mechanisms that bridge this abstraction gap. In this paper, a generic black box approach is used to map high-level requirements expressed by users in SLAs to low-level network parameters included in policies, enabling Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement by triggering the required policies and manage the infrastructure accordingly. In addition, a mechanism for determining the importance of different QoS parameters is presented, mainly used for "relevant" QoS metrics recommendation in the SLA templates.

SLAs in 5G: A Complete Framework Facilitating VNF- and NS- Tailored SLAs Management

“…In recent cloud-related we have witnessed the emergence of a new category which is the mapping of SLA between Service Provider, Infrastructure Provider and end users [12]. A brief description, similar to our work, is presented in [8]. In this case, the authors presented an approach for mapping the high-level end-user requirements to the low-level policy parameters, as briefly described, and also proposed a mechanism for suggesting the most important QoS parameters to the Service/Infrastructure Provider, in order to achieve better QoS assurance.…”

“…The SLA Framework incorporates an approach for mapping the high-level requirements (expressed by end users) to low-level policy (i.e. resource) parameters, as described in [8]. Machine learning allows the automated identification of relationships and dependencies between different parameters of datasets.…”

Managing and Optimizing Quality of Service in 5G Environments Across the Complete SLA Lifecycle

“…It should be pointed out, that a preliminary description of our work can be found in [14,15,18], where the authors presented an approach for mapping the high-level end-user requirements the low-level policy parameters, and at the same time proposed a mechanism for suggesting the most important QoS parameters to the Service/Infrastructure Provider, in order to achieve better QoS assurance. In the present paper, we are going beyond an isolated SLA management framework, by trying to support business guarantees in the overall lifecycle of NSs.…”

“…Considering the aforementioned set of challenges, in this paper, we are trying to portray an "SLA-Oriented Framework" which targets the profitable provisioning of QoS guarantees, in 5G environments. The proposed approach is based on mapping the high-level customers' requirements to low-level recourse attributes, as shortly described in [14,15]. The proposed Framework adopts an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach, making it easily adaptable to different software components like VNFs and NSs.…”

Towards Autonomic Policy-based Network Service Deployment with SLA and Monitoring

“…These may be included in policy rules as the Service Provider is able to modify them accordingly, through updating existing ones and enrich SLAs with additional parameters. High-level parameters (performance, availability, security) specified for the NS in an SLA, are linked to low-level requirements encapsulated in the respective policies [4] .…”