A generic SLA negotiation protocol for Virtualized Environments

Many companies use the Internet as a basis for their services, defining Service Level Agreements (SLA) with their respective Internet Service Providers. However, the current Internet works in a Best Effort manner, what points toward the concept of network virtualization to support the Future Internet. Within this context, this work proposes a generic SLA negotiation protocol for Virtualized Environments (VEs). The proposed protocol allows the client to negotiate resources (for example, the bandwidth for the virtual network or the storage capacity of the cloud) and features (for example, protocol stack of the virtual network or operating system in the cloud) used in the VE. Experiments showed the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in fulfilling the requirements defined by the client.