Abstract
Within the past few years, the variety of real-time multimedia streaming services on the Internet has grown steadily. Performance of streaming services is very sensitive to traffic congestion and results very often in poor service quality on today’s best effort Internet. Reasons include the lack of any traffic prioritization mechanisms on the network level and its dependence on the cooperation of several Internet Service Providers and their reliable transmission of data packets. Therefore, service differentiation and its reliable delivery must be enforced on a business level through the introduction of service contracts between service providers and their customers. However, compliance with such service contracts is the crucial point that decides about successful improvement of the service delivery process. For that reason, an agent-based monitoring framework has been developed and introduced enabling the use of mobile agents to monitor compliance with contractual agreements between service providers and service customers. This framework describes the setup and the functionality of different kinds of mobile agents that allow monitoring of service contracts across domains of multiple service providers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
S. Blake, D. Black, M. Carlson, E. Davies, Z. Wang, and W. Weiss: An Architecture for Differentiated Services; IETF, Request for Comments RFC 2475, December 1998.
N. Brownlee: NeTraMet (Network Traffic Meter); http://www2.auckland.ac.nz/net/Accounting/ntm.Release.note.html, February 2001.
Cisco: IOS Netflow; http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/732/Tech/netflow/, February 2002.
Crystaliz, Inc., General Magic, Inc., GMD Focus, IBM Corp.: Mobile Agent Facility Specification; Technical Report, Object Management Group (OMG), 1997.
S. Deering, R. Hinden: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6)—Specification; IETF, Request for Comments RFC 2460, December 1998.
J. Ferber: Multi-Agent Systems: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1999.
D. Grossman: New Terminology and Clarifications for Diffserv; Internet Draft, draft-ietfdiffserv-new-terms-08.txt, January 2002.
M. Günter, T. Braun: Internet Service Delivery Control with Mobile Code; IFIP Conference on Intelligence in Networks (SmartNet 2000), Vienna, Austria, September 18–22, 2000.
Hewlett-Packard: IUM (Internet Usage Manager); http://www.hp.com/communications/usage/ium/index.html, February 2002.
H. Kneer, H. Häuschen, K. Bauknecht: Tradable Service Level Agreements to Manage Network Resources for Streaming Internet Services; 10th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2002), Gdansk, Poland, June 6–8, 2002.
H. Kneer, R. Marfurt: Contracting Protocol for Managing Quality of Service in a Multi-Provider Environment; Submitted to IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet, Lisbon, Portugal, 2002.
H. Kneer, U. Zurfluh, B. Stiller: A Model for Value-added Internet Service Provisioning; First IFIP Conference on E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Government, Zurich, Switzerland, October 3–5, 2001.
H. Kneer, U. Zurfluh, G. Dermler, and B. Stiller: A Business Model for Charging and Accounting of Internet Services; International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2000), Greenwich, U.K., September 4–6, 2000.
D.B. Lange, M. Oshima: Seven Good Reasons for Mobile Agents; Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42, No. 3, pages 88–89, March 1999.
R. Murch, T. Johnson: Intelligent Software Agents; Prentice Hall, 1999.
J. Niessen, P. Oldenburg: Service Level Management—Customer Focused; The Stationary Office, Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), 1997.
J. Postel (Edt.): Internet Protocol; IETF, Request for Comments RFC 791, September 1981.
B. Schneier: Applied Cryptography; Wiley, 1995.
R. Steinmetz: Multimedia-Technologie: Grundlagen, Komponenten und Systeme; 2nd edition, Springer, 1999.
UUNET: Service Level Agreements; http://www.uu.net/terms/sla/, February 2002.
M.J. Wooldridge, N.R. Jennings: Software engineering with agents: pitfalls and pratfalls; IEEE Internet Computing, pages 20–27, May/June 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kneer, H., Stormer, H., Häuschen, H., Stiller, B. (2002). An Agent-Based Framework for Monitoring Service Contracts. In: Bauknecht, K., Tjoa, A.M., Quirchmayr, G. (eds) E-Commerce and Web Technologies. EC-Web 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45705-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45705-4_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44137-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45705-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive