Coordination in P2P management overlays to improve decentralized detection of SLA violations

Critical networked services enable significant revenue for network operators and, in turn, are regulated by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In order to ensure SLAs are being met, service levels need to be monitored. One technique for this involves active measurement mechanisms which employ measurement probes along the network to inject synthetic traffic and compute the network performance. However, these mechanisms are expensive in terms of resources consumption. Thus, active measurement mechanisms usually can cover only a fraction of what could be measured, which can lead to SLA violations being missed. Besides that, the definition of this fraction is a practice done by human administrators, which does not scale well and does not adapt to highly dynamic networking patterns. The contribution of the present work is the proposal of a solution to increase the potential number of detected SLA violations in which network devices autonomously and dynamically share service level measurement results. The sharing of these measurement results is based on the utilization of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) management overlay built using past service level measurement results and a coordination strategy characterized by a high degree of decentralized decision making. The solution is evaluated using simulation and the results show its feasibility and interesting features.