Permanent Customer-Provider Relationships for Electronic Service Markets

Abstract

In recent years the development of distributed applications on increasingly powerful communication networks has become one of the major challenges in communication technologies. Open service markets have been established which offer a multitude of services to an unlimited number of customers. Up to now the relationship between service customer and provider is short-termed, i.e. the services are mediated on demand. On the other hand service providers do not have any obligation to provide certain services or to ensure a defined service quality. They can also withdraw their offer at any time. For many service customers this situation will be acceptable, but for others, especially commercial ones, this might be insufficient. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a permanent service supplier relationship for establishing a permanent relationship between service customers and providers. We describe how such relationships can be set up and suggest a service property scheme for this. Finally we show how these relationships can be implemented by using Virtual Private Resources.