Building Stakeholder Trust in Internet of Things (IoT) Data Services using Information Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) defines a contract between network service providers and consumers, specifying the terms of a service which providers will make available and the conditions which consumers will accept. To date, SLAs have been specified using basic terms, such as availability and network performance, with a consumer being compensated in the event that the service provided does not meet the terms agreed. Given changes in the ways which network services are now made available, however, SLA terms are changing to capture both the differences in service provision and, additionally, in the responsibilities of the parties involved. It is this aspect of information SLAs which we respond to in this work, and we propose a SLA model which accommodates the requirements of these new relationships. We also propose a set of metrics, a selection of which are presented in this paper to demonstrate our concept, and recommend that a selection can be adapted by consumers. Finally, due to the intricate relationships between data consumers and data providers in the IoT environment and the fact that metric adaptation may lead to SLA violation, we discuss SLA conflict resolution through prioritizing non-functional metrics on a per-customer basis.