Concluded WG Service Level Specification and Usage (sls)
Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.
| WG | Name | Service Level Specification and Usage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acronym | sls | ||
| Area | Operations and Management Area (ops) | ||
| State | Concluded | ||
| Charter | charter-ietf-sls-01 Approved | ||
| Document dependencies | |||
| Personnel | Chairs | Raju Rajan, Yves T'Joens |
Final Charter for Working Group
Providing QoS enabled services across a diffserv enabled network is
often closely linked with the negotiation of a Service Level
Specification (as defined in draft-ietf-diffserv-new-terms-03.txt) over
the administrative boundary where the service is provided.
The SLS BOF will examine whether a Working Group should be chartered to
design a formal extensible model for Service Level Specifications and
requirements for the negotiation of Service Levels across
(administrative) boundaries. Based on input from the BOF a sharply
focused proposal with milestones will be submitted, if need be.
The need to have an agreed set of Service Level Specification
parameters
and semantics is twofold.
A formal, extensible specification would enable automation of the
service negotiation process. Providers and customers would benefit from
the faster turnaround of service fulfillment. Providers would continue
to enjoy flexibility in designing their service offerings, and
customers
would enjoy independence from their point of attachment.
Second, the design and the deployment of services across a multi-vendor
and multi-provider environment requires a standardized set of semantics
for Service Level Specifications being negotiated at different
locations: (a) between the customer and the service provider (b) within
an administrative domain (for intra-domain SLS negotiation purposes)
and
(c) between administrative domains (for inter-domain negotiation
purposes).
While the semantics of the Service Level Specification need to be
defined in a vendor-independent, interoperable and scalable manner, the
syntax of the specification may be represented in different
specification languages, eg., CIM, LDAP schemata, XML DITs, etc.
Similarly, while the semantics of message exchanges during service
negotiation need to be specified, the actual packet formats may depend
on the protocol chosen for such a negotiation.
The notion of customer and provider as used within this description
refer to a service requesting and a service offering entity
respectively, and does not imply the specification of any particular
business model.
The BOF will be used to gain input on the scope of the proposed working
group, such that the goal of semantic specification is fulfilled,
together with a narrow but representative syntactic set.