An Efficient and Lightweight Method for Service Level Agreement Assessment

Traditional approaches to on-line end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) assessment have focused on the estimation of network QoS parameters. These approaches, however, face a trade-off between accuracy and the amount of resources needed to achieve such accuracy. This paper offers an alternative approach, where instead of estimating QoS parameters, the authors propose an effective and lightweight solution for directly detecting SLA violations. The solution monitors the Inter-Packet Arrival Time (IPAT) at an end-point, wherein current IPAT distributions are periodically compared with a set of reference IPAT distributions as the main basis for detecting SLA violations.