Secure Collaboration Mechanism for SLA delivery among IPTV providers

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) specify the quality levels customers expect during service provisioning. A critical issue in this area is for service providers to effectively achieve the individual SLA optimization in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and price. In Mobile IPTV (M-IPTV) scenario, the personalized service provision and timely/on-demand delivery demands high quantity of available resources that a single provider might not be able to provide. Therefore, it is a growing interest in collaboration and resource sharing among IPTV providers to provide high quality services. We propose a protocol for secure M-IPTV service delegation to support SLAs of an IPTV provider through access control extension to different security domains using Single Sign-On (SSO) technique. Moreover, IPTV provider shares individualized policies within B2B environment to provide users with a consistent unified experience and a seamless logon. Therefore, this study demonstrates the efficiency of collaborative IPTV service when SLA is strictly considered in cases of limited resources of a single IPTV provider.