A Hierarchial Approach to Service Negotiation
04 July 2011
Service negotiation benefits service providers and their clients. It can help cope with provisioning and activation delays, can help in learning and leveraging client preferences, can support dynamic pricing schemes such as congestion pricing, and can support discounts, bundles, add-ons, and other special offers. Much existing work on service negotiation assumes that a service provider will negotiate based on the resources it needs to provide a service. This approach makes it hard to define the scope of negotiation policy, and assumes unrealistically that service providers have full knowledge and control of their resources. We propose a new model of service negotiation in which resources are treated as services, and service provider offerings are expressed as logical formulas. This model helps manage complexity by allowing policy to be decomposed, each component having well-defined scope. In this paper we present our hierarchical negotiation model, and a negotiation protocol and negotiation policy language based on it.
