A business-oriented perspective for QoS management

Research efforts in Quality of Service (QoS) management have usually addressed the problem under the network infrastructure perspective whereas a business-oriented perspective, named Service Quality Management (SQM), is being considered by industry. This paper point out differences and similarities between two approaches and addresses the main issues arising under SQM perspective. Here, QoS indicators and corresponding service levels are defined to provide a common understanding of service delivery, and a critical issue is to provide an effective way to evaluate them. Two evaluation modes are used: off-line and on-line. Off-line methods compute indicators values at the end of a pre-defined evaluation period, whereas on-line methods do it when a related event occurs. This work proposes an architecture for SQM systems and discusses the mechanisms for both off-line and on-line evaluation modes.