| Abstract | The evolution of mechanisms for providing
Quality-of-Service (QoS) over the contemporary network
infrastructures has introduced the need for regulation and
management of the emerging QoS services with the use of
Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs for QoS-enabled
networks move one step forward in the direction of
traditional ones, in the sense that they do not only have to
specify availability, security, quantity of allocated resources
and a number of other quantitative values but also have to
specify the values of appropriate quality parameters. This
paper deals with the particular cases of introduction of QoS
mechanisms to large transport networks according to the
DiffServ architecture. In these cases, the extensive level of
aggregation of flows and the connectionless nature of QoS
services’ provisioning makes the definition of QoS
parameters and the engineering of QoS metrics in the
traditional SLA specification a demanding task. Due to the
fact that strictly bounded deterministic guarantees are not
realistic, usually only upper bounds for the relevant
parameters can be defined and the corresponding SLAs have
to be defined accordingly.
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