Trading Service Level Agreements within a Peer-to-Peer market

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer networks provide an important abstraction for modelling the trade of capabilities within a market environment. We consider a particular instance of such a market, where the traded object includes directly provisioned services (i.e. those that are delivered through capabilities directly owned by the provider), or indirectly provisioned services (i.e. those that are delivered through an alternative provider). As a Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents a contract to deliver capability at some point in the future, we use an SLA as a tradeable object whose value can fluctuate. We describe how a variation in value of an SLA can influence the overall “welfare” within a Peer-to-Peer system, and how such value is dependent on the overall demand for services and the redemption time associated with the SLA.