Providing Managed Services to End-Users

The goal of monitoring contractual service level agreements (SLAs) is to measure the performance of a service, to evaluate whether its provider complies with the level of quality of the service (QoS) that the consumer expects. The aim of this paper is to bring to the system designer's attention the fundamental issues that monitoring of contractual SLAs involves: SLA specification, separation of the computation and communication infrastructure of the provider, service points of presence, metric collection approaches, measurement service and evaluation and violation detection service. The paper develops an architecture and give reasons why currently it is practicable to offer guaranteed QoS only to consumers sharing Internet service providers (ISPs) directly with the service provider.

Steering Incentives of Platforms: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry

Over The Top (OTT) provider detecting bad QoS for their users can not influence on the network by themselves. In the other hand, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) along the path only see the effect in their own network. The users might agree on reducing a property (e.g., the bandwidth) on contract Service Level Agreements (SLA) with ISP to enhance other properties (e.g., Round Trip Time). This paper proposes a communication mechanism between OTT and its own ISP who could act as a relay with bordering ISPs chaining up to user premises, thus finally obtaining better QoS for the pair OTT/user reducing ISPs load in return. This paper proposes a REST interface for the specific case in which enforced RTT is to be exchanged by reducing available bandwidth as a counterpart, to be extended in future work.

This paper presents the contributions of the phd thesis “Mechanisms for management of SLA for Virtual Software Defined Networks based on QoS Classes”. Over the years the Internet has become the primary means of communication, where the users expect to access the Internet anytime, anywhere, and with a certain quality level. As a consequence, in the past few years the traffic demand to Internet access has increased. However, since the current Internet does not guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE), the companies apply a Service Level Agreements (SLA) with Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In this way, the Internet service providers aim to improve utilization of network resources and service delivery to the users through the deployment of Virtual Networks (VNs) over Software Defined Networks (SDNs), called virtual software defined networks (VSDNs). However, the management of this type of environment still presents open issues. In this context, a set of mechanisms to manage VSDN was developed. The objectives of the developed mechanisms are to negotiate, to deploy and to adapt the VSDNs according to the current state of the network infrastructure and the SLA definition.

From the viewpoint of service level agreements (SLAs), Internet service providers and customers are gradually focusing on transmission accuracy. The Internet service provider should provide the specific bandwidth and individual accuracy rate requirement by their SLAs to each customer. This paper mainly evaluates the system reliability that a stochastic computer network can fulfill all requirements at all sinks. An efficient algorithm is proposed to generate the lower boundary points, minimal capacity vectors satisfying the demand and accuracy rate requirement for all sinks. The system reliability can be computed in terms of such points by applying recursive sum of disjoint products.

The new IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) provides an overlay architecture for IP based core networks and enables the efficient provision of an open set of potentially highly integrated multimedia services (i.e. instant messaging, video conferencing, VoIP, application sharing, etc) on top of possibly different access technologies. However, there will be different domains and IMSs managed by different ISPs (Internet service providers) in the Internet. Each ISP has an SLA (service level agreement) established between its users, which defines what kind of resources and prices was agreed to be offered to each user. However there is no SLA between a visited domain and a mobile user. This paper analyses how to extend the QoS capabilities of the IMS offered to a mobile terminal when it roams among different domains. We propose a framework that integrates QoS and mobility management. This integration envisages the improvement of the overall end-to-end performance and the reduction of management entities in the network. The architecture presents the domain policy manager (DPM) as the decision-making and controller of a domain. The proposed architecture uses policies with inter-domain negotiation. An application scenario to show the framework functionality is described as well as the current status of the implementation.

This study investigates the relationship between user perception and the perceived quality of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) using Weighted Least Squares Regression (WLS). With the rapid advancement of digital technologies and the increasing importance of internet services, understanding customer satisfaction and its determinants is crucial for ISPs. The research employs a quantitative approach, collecting data from 181 students at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) through a structured questionnaire. The study examines how speed, reliability, and customer assistance influence user perception and, consequently, the overall evaluation of ISP services. The findings reveal that user perception, weighted by user ratings, has a substantial and statistically significant impact on the perceived quality of ISPs. The high R-Square value (0.807) and significant F- and t-values confirm that user perception is a substantial predictor of ISP service evaluations. Descriptive statistics indicate that respondents generally have a favorable opinion of ISPs, though there is variability in individual assessments. The study also highlights the importance of demographic factors such as gender, age, and educational qualification in shaping user perception, while the profession was insignificant. Theoretical implications support models like SERVQUAL, emphasising the centrality of customer perception in service evaluation. The study suggests that ISPs should invest in customer care, quality improvements, and data-driven decision-making to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Socially, the findings underscore the importance of reliable internet access for digital inclusion, particularly in underserved populations. The study concludes with recommendations for future research, including using longitudinal data and machine learning techniques to explore user perception and satisfaction with ISPs further.

At present time the ISP (Internet Service Provider) already make a great impact to the human life as well as the economic society, everything has a close relation with the internet service and due to the fast development of information technology further lower the cost of ISP and improved the service speed as well as its quality. All of this make the customer layer of ISP more popular than before and thus bring up the fierce competition in this industry. Due to the entry barrier of high investment and high technology of ISP industry it has become as a monopoly market and the monopoly market is very respect the competition and cooperation relationship with competitors. Besides, most of the relevant literature in the past is focus on the measurement and analysis of customer to the self-company and few of them mention how to include the satisfaction of competitor’s customer into measurement and analysis. As golden strategy stated in the Sun-Tze Strategic: “Know yourself and know your competitor well, winning every war.” we must consider the strength, weakness, opportunity and threat on customer satisfaction of your company and competitors. Base on the above motivation, this article will apply the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) methodology of 6-Sigma, focus on the viewpoint of customer satisfaction of ISP industry. At first we utilize the 5 equal scale measurement define the network quality item of ISP, which provided by the self-company and competitors. And measuring the degree of “satisfaction” and “importance” of these quality items, then use the performance evaluation matrix and strength and weakness matrix to analyze the Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat of self and competitors, focus on the quality items that fall out of the 2 sigma and use the strength–weakness strategic chart to establish the improvement strategy. And at last, utilize the strength–weakness matrix chart as the control tool to verify and sustain the effectiveness of the improved performance. The complete and easy measurement improvement model provided in this article can be used by the enterprise to effectively and quickly evaluating and analyzing the service quality of self and competitors. And under the reasonable cost condition with considering the competing opportunity and threat of market to effectively improving the customer service quality and promoting the overall customer satisfaction and create powerful high value-added quality competition strength.

This chapter introduces a greedy approach for delay monitoring of IP networks. It proposed two-phased monitoring scheme that ensures complete coverage of the network from both links and paths point of views, and it minimizes the monitoring overhead on the underlying production network. In the first phase it computes the locations of monitoring stations such that all network links or paths are covered by the minimal number of stations. Subsequently, in the second phase, it computes the minimal set of probe messages to be sent by each station such that the latency of every routing path can be measured. Unfortunately, both the station selection and the probe assignment problems are NP-hard. However, by using greedy approximation algorithms the scheme finds solutions close to the best possible approximations to both the station selection and the probe assignment problems. Further, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithms for accurately monitoring large networks with very few monitoring stations and probe messages close to the number of network links.

As the service sector is gaining more attention over the past few decades, service supply chains are being widely investigated to improve service quality. Specifically, with the proliferation of digital infrastructure, there is a plethora of demand for internet services, which makes the wireless communications industry highly competitive. Thus, internet service providers (ISPs) must ensure that their efforts are targeted towards attracting and retaining customers for continued growth. Since Web 2.0 has gained traction and more tools have become available, customers in recent times are equipped to make well-informed decisions, specifically due to the colossal information available in online reviews. ISPs can use this information to better understand the views of the customers about their products and services. The goal of this paper is to identify the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of several leading ISPs by exploring consumer reviews using text analytics. The proposed approach consists of four different stages: bigram and trigram analyses, topic identification, SWOT analysis and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). For each ISP, we first categorize online reviews into positive and negative based on customer ratings and then leverage text analytic tools to determine the most frequently used and co-occurring words in each categorization of reviews. Subsequently, looking at the positive and negative topics in each ISP, we conduct the SWOT analysis as well as the RCA to help companies identify the internal and external factors impacting customer satisfaction. We use a case study to illustrate the proposed approach. The managerial insights that are derived from the results can act as a decision support tool for ISPs to offer better products and services for their customers.KeywordsInternet service providerWeb 2.0Online customer reviewsText analyticsRoot cause analysisSWOT analysis

The full potential of smart cities is not yet realized, and opportunities continue to exist in relation to the business models which govern service provision in cities. In saying this, we make reference to the waste services made available by councils across cities in the United Kingdom (UK). In the UK, smart waste management (SWM) continues to exist as a service trialed across designated cities, and schemes are not yet universally deployed. This therefore exists as a business model which might be improved so that wider roll-out and uptake may be encouraged. In this paper, we present a proposal of how to revise SWM services through integrating the Internet service provider (ISP) into the relationship alongside home and business customers and the city council. The goal of this model is to give customers the opportunity for a more dynamic and flexible service. Furthermore, it will introduce benefits for all parties, in the sense of more satisfied home and business owners, ISPs with a larger customer base and greater profits, and city councils with optimized expenses. We propose that this is achieved using personalized and flexible SLAs. A proof-of-concept model is presented in this paper, through which we demonstrate that the cost to customers can be optimized when they interact with the SWM scheme in the recommended ways.

Bandwidth-aware allocation of resilient Virtual Software Defined Networks

In the differentiated services (DS) enabled networks, Internet service providers (ISPs) establish service level agreements (SLAs) with their customers. Prices of the SLAs and quality of data transmission services should correspond to the requirements of the customers and operations aims of the ISPs. For this reason, IP domains of the ISPs should contain a control system for setting the selling prices of the SLAs and DS services used for data flows of the SLAs. The control system should consider dynamically both requirements of the customers and quality of end-to-end data transmission services. This task is complex because the customers and operators of other networks may not give useful information to the ISPs for the control task. For this reason, a new fuzzy controller based control system is developed. The system operates using local measurements of ingress routers of IP domains about the behaviour of the customers. It does not inquire the level of satisfaction of the customers about offered data transmission services, or capacities of networks of other operators. The operations of the control system are tested using the Network Simulator 2.Key wordsMulti-service InternetDifferentiated ServicesService Level AgreementsFuzzy controllers

Service level agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between a service provider and a service consumer to guarantee the Quality of service (QoS) expectations, it is used in all areas of information technology, such as Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT), networks and Web services. For IoT applications, the main challenges are: (1) how to describe the SLA terms, such as QoS properties, service levels, penalties in SLA violation, (2) how to monitor these terms, and (3) how to integrate an SLA into all the IoT application layers. Therefore, in this paper, we propose ML-SLA-IoT, a framework for SLA specification and monitoring. It covers the entire layers of an IoT application. It describes precisely QoS levels, provided services, and obligations. It differs from other SLA specification languages in the specification of user preferences, the use of microservices (for reusability, dynamism and ease of integration) and ML-SLA (multi-level metrics and QoS according to existing constraints and user preferences). Furthermore, ML-SLA-IoT monitors SLA terms in an automatic and decentralised manner using smart contracts and blockchain technologies without the intervention of the third-party. Finally, we present a comparative study and experiments with existing solutions regarding to some criteria for SLA specification and monitoring. Our results show that ML-SLA-IoT gives better performance in terms of dynamic pricing, obligation combination, and SLA monitoring.

An internet service provider (ISP) tries to maximize profit by choosing an appropriate price for an offered service. In this paper, a system of two identical ISPs is considered. When ISPs independently choose a price to charge to maximize profit and each ISP repeatedly tries to improve profit by changing the price till no further improvements are possible, they may reach an equilibrium called the Nash equilibrium. Another strategy is that one ISP announces an appropriate price in advance and the other ISP chooses the best response strategy. This leads to Stackelberg competition. Both these strategies are compared in the paper. In this paper, it is assumed that few clients have access to multiple ISPs by using multi-SIM handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets. The clients who have access to multiple-ISPs choose an appropriate ISP for service based on the price of the service. The clients who have access to only one ISP, have no choice but to take service from the ISP. Simulations show that the ISP who announces an appropriate price in advance is likely to do better as compared to the ISP who decides the price later after observing the price of the announcer. Simulations also show that announcing an appropriate price in advance is better instead of independently deciding the price which may lead to a Nash equilibrium in terms of profit of the ISPs and quality of service provided to the clients.