Service level negotiation in ubiquitous environments

The goal of the ubiquitous connectivity is to enable mobile users to be permanently and transparently connected to the Internet, with the desired quality of service. In such an environment, it becomes very difficult for service providers to satisfy the needs of users. A solution is to assign a profile to each user in order to optimize and automate the dynamic service level negotiation. These mobile users are often connected to wireless networks and consuming services that require quality of service guarantees such as video on demand or voice over IP. Hence, in ubiquitous environments, we need to guarantee both quality of service and security for mobile users communications. In this paper, we present a protocol for service level negotiation which uses Web Services and includes both quality of service and security in its negotiation. Then, we propose to adapt this protocol, called SLNP, to ubiquitous environments by basing its processing on the user profile and by specifying a collaboration with the IEEE 802.21 standard, which manages the mobility of users and participates in the creation of profiles. Details of the implantation and experimental tests are also shown in this paper.