Monitoring multimedia quality of service in public Cloud Service Level Agreements

In this paper we propose a model for monitoring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provided by public Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), such as Amazon and Rackspace, to customers utilizing the cloud infrastructure to deliver multimedia content to their internal and external users. Our approach recommends that an independent neutral third party entity monitors services offered by public CSPs to ensure that the SLAs offered to the clients are honored by the provider. The proposed entity can reduce the likelihood of disputes between the CSP and its customers, since we argue that there is a conflict of interest when a given CSP offers quality of service (QoS) reporting to its customers, because customers cannot independently verify the accuracy of such QoS reports in many cases, as discussed in this paper.