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

Category

Conference Article

Published

8 June 2018

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