Maximizing profit using SLA-aware provisioning

Abstract

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a Service Provider (SP) and a customer that typically includes the customer requirements that the SP guarantees, the fee paid to the SP if the requirements are satisfied, and the penalty incurred by the SP if they are violated. Since an important requirement is the customer's service availability, we focus on routing and admission control in optical networks to improve the SP's ability to meet customers' availability requirements. Previous researchers used statistical path availabilities to satisfy SLA requirements. A more accurate measure is the actual probability that the request will satisfy the SLA requirements. Furthermore, since typically the SP's goal is to maximize profit, a good admission control policy should also consider the profitability of the request. We study the problem of provisioning connection requests to maximize profit in optical networks. We propose a two-step solution to this problem: first, efficient SLA-aware routing and second, intelligent admission control. For the SLA-aware routing, we consider both single path and pair of paths (one primary and one backup) solutions that route the request while minimizing the SLA violation probability. For the admission control, we propose a model to express the profitability of a request and an admission control policy that considers the violation probability and profitability to determine if and how the request should be admitted. Our admission control policy assesses a request's profitability by considering not only its expected profit but also by quantifying its resource utilization. Our results show that our solution provisions more requests, satisfies more SLA requirements, and yields more expected profit than the traditional approach.