Service quality in TINA-quality of service trading in open network architecture

0163-6804/98/$10.00 © 1998 IEEE elecommunication Information Network Architecture (TINA) has been under development at the TINA Consortium (TINA-C) core team since 1993, and the project released final specifications at the end of 1997.1 TINA addresses three major domains of network architecture: • The distributed processing environment (DPE) • Network resource architecture • Service architecture DPE is a distributed object-oriented platform technology, which is compliant with the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture (OMG’s CORBA). TINA also adopted RM-ODP viewpoints as its specification methodology; information, computational, and engineering specifications of objects are distinguished and given separately. As a part of the TINA service architecture, we were inspired to investigate the enterprise-level issues of quality of service (QoS), which resulted in the service quality framework presented in this article. Several QoS architectures have been proposed in the past [1, 2]. In [3], Aurrecoechea et al. give an excellent survey of existing QoS architectures. Based on the previous TINA work, this article examines the service quality issue from the enterprise point of view. Despite the large difference in realization and underlying technical assumptions, QoS architectures can be summarized by interactions between basic four elements, which we later call the QoS quartet. By using this approach, we identified each element placed in the current TINA service and network resource architecture. Due to the broad nature of the problem, this article is organized as follows. We discuss enterprise-level issues in the second section. Service quality, which is a service-level issue, is discussed in the third section. In the fourth and fifth sections, we explain the soft guarantee concept in TINA service quality framework. In the sixth section, realization issues of soft guarantee are discussed, followed by its impact on the pricing structure in the seventh section.