jitter, delay, throughput are dealt separately with at the network layer and
it is usually, difficult for application developers to specify their network level
QoS requirements at design or run-time.
In this work, we focus our attention to enterprise networks and enterprise
applications. Internet is too big a domain to start tackling, even though the
protocols may be the same.
SLA and QoS parameters at the application layer reflects the quality
of service to the customer. They can be different according to the types
of service. On the other hand, network QoS parameters means the basic
metric of performance measurement of network level QoS at the network
management layer.
The goal of our effort is to map Network performance metrics (NPM) to
QoS parameters (SLAs) and then giving the view of the network in terms of
SLAs to applications, pricing, conformance etc and not in terms of NPMs to
customer, network provider and application provider. Here, we collect NPMs
from the network through SLA agent and then map them to QoS.
Say, some application wants a delay of less than 50 msec. We should be
able to collect the Network state (which is nothing, but NPMs which are:
traffic congestion, throughput, availability and latency).
As an example for the IP enterprise network, the SLA of some service
provider for some application (like video, voice) with the customer can be as
follows: The availability over 99.99 % should be assured. The average RTT
(round trip time) should be less than 50 msec. The delivery ratio should be
more than 98.0%. The QoS network parameters would be in terms of avail-
ability, delay, jitterand loss. The network monitoring methods use to measure
2