Technological and Economic Aspects for Quality of Service in Multidomain Alliances

Providing end-to-end quality-assured services implies many challenges, which go beyond technical ones, involving as well economic and even cultural or political issues. In this thesis we first focus on a technical problem and then intent a more holistic regard to the whole problem, considering at the same time Network Service Providers (NSPs), stakeholders and buyers' behaviour and satisfaction. One of the most important problems when deploying interdomain path selection with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements is being able to rely the computations on metrics that hold for a long period of time. Our proposal for solving that problem is to compute bounds on the metrics, taking into account the uncertainty on the traffic demands. We then move to a NSP-alliance scenario, where we propose a complete framework for selling interdomain quality-assured services, and subsequently distributing revenues. At the end of the thesis we adopt a more holistic approach and consider the interactions with the monitoring plane and the buyers' behaviour. We propose a simple pricing scheme and study it in detail, in order to use QoS monitoring information as feedback to the business plane, with the ultimate objective of improving the seller's revenue.