The IT Innovation Centre, University of Southampton has been developing a business layer within edutain@grid that is capable of supporting the commercial business models for ROIA providers in ways that do not effect the core performance of the applications themselves. The business layer framework is based on the GRIA middleware.

Secure transactions for real-time applications

We provide authentication, access control and transport layer security at the service level. Users are identified using X.509 certificates and a single sign-on. Access control to ROIA and hosters is provided using SAML tokens issued by a Coordinator who sells access to the ROIA and coordinates multiple hosters who are running ROIA instances on allocated server machines. To ensure real-time application performance is not compromised we set up the security context for each user in the login phase and propagate it to the real-time transport protocols used in the ROIA connection, so enabling a high performance secure connection to be established quickly in the run-time phase.

Service level agreements defining quality of service

To support the business context we provide services to negotiate electronic bi-partite Service Level Agreements (SLA) that describe both the cost of provision of a ROIA over a number of server machines and the Quality of Service (QoS) that will be provided by that hosting organization. Dynamic invoice models allow hosters to price based on both resource provision (the classic service provision model) and on actual resource or service usage (based on QoS measurement).

Cross-hoster load management

The business layer also supports an innovative cross-hoster load management feature, exploiting live Quality of Service monitoring of a portfolio of hosters and enabling both zone and session migration between them. This cross-hoster load management by the coordinator is in addition to the usual load management done by each hoster across their local resources. Cross-hoster load management allows the coordinator to optimise the use of different hosters (e.g. to favour those with low costs or high QoS), or introduce new hosters at run-time to handle situations where the ROIA (e.g. an on line game) becomes more popular than can be handled by existing hosters within the their SLA terms.

Adding Value

The edutain@grid business layer allows hosters to move away from classic uni-directional resource provision and single-hoster provisioning scenarios. We allow ROIA providers to provision across hosting organizations, developing enhanced business models using bi-directional agreements which supports a focus on Quality of Experience not just Quality of Service.

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