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AssigneeAlcatel Lucent
InventorsPeter Rabinovitch, Arnold Jansen, Zlatko Krstulich
Estimating the term…
About 1 year of term left · ends 29 Oct 2027 (estimated)
A method and apparatus for assessing a communications' network adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is presented. The apparatus includes a arrival curve parameter derivation and arrival curve parameter reporting means. A arrival curve parameter generator may be implemented either in hardware for a predefined response in fitting arrival curves to cumulative content arrival variations, or in software for flexibility in the content traffic considered for assessment. The arrival curve generator may be associated with a physical port, a line card, or a network node. Arrival curve parameters defining arrival curves are employed by a Network Management System (NMS) in conjunction with communications network node and communications network service curves in performing SLA conformance assessments. The advantages are derived from a distributed content traffic characterization in terms of arrival curves, a reduced resource overhead in conveying arrival curve parameters without sacrificing SLA assessment thoroughness.
A method of characterizing a content traffic flow at communication nodes of a communications network for communications network Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance assessment by a network management system (NMS) connected to said communication nodes, the method comprising:
A method of assessing communications network conformance to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in respect of a content traffic flow at communication nodes of a communications network, the method comprising:
A method of centrally assessing communications network conformance to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in respect of a content traffic flow at least one of a plurality of communication nodes of a communications network, the method comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
The invention relates to communications, and in particular to ensuring service provider conformance to service level agreements.
In the field of communications, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) concerns agreed upon communications service provisioning terms and conditions between a communications services customer making use of communications services provided by a communications service provider. An exemplary SLA may specify communications service provisioning terms including, but not limited to: committed up-link and down-link rates, maximum up-link (and down-link) burst sizes, duration of schedule maintenance down time, availability, etc.
Communications services customers such as, but not limited to: individual users and organizations, negotiate SLAs with communications service providers. Service provider communications networks connect to backbone communications networks and other peer service provider communications networks to participate/provision wide area networked interconnectivity and in so doing negotiate SLAs therebetween.
The features and advantages of the invention will become more apparent from the following detailed description of the preferred embodiment(s) with reference to the attached diagrams wherein:
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing interconnected communications network elements participating in a managed communications network;
FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram showing exemplary variation in time of cumulative content being received and corresponding reported arrival curves in accordance with an exemplary embodiment of the invention;
It will be noted that in the attached diagrams like features bear similar labels.
A way to assess the ability of a communications network to provision services in conformance with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is to: inject test traffic into the communications network via an access link, and monitor the response/reaction of the communications network to the test traffic. Implementing such a solution would require special purpose test equipment including, but not limited to: content generators, content traffic monitors, statistics generators, etc. all of which would incur additional expenses.
To minimize costs, a small number of packet generators and content traffic monitors would have to be moved from location to location to assess an overall behavior of the communications network, however such an overall behavior would only be approximate to real-time communications network behavior because such piece-meal testing would not measure synergistic responses/reactions of the communications network to communications traffic flow patterns when multiple sources concurrently convey multiple content flows to multiple sinks.
Network service management, e.g. ensuring proper service fulfilment according to agreements: managing SLA; Interaction between SLA and QoS
Managing SLA; Interaction between SLA and QoS: determining service level performance parameters or violations of service level contracts, e.g.…
Based on type of value added network service under agreement: wherein the managed service relates to media content delivery, e.g. audio, video or TV
Generation of reports: related to network traffic
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