The Service Provider Group framework

Both within the Business and e-Science world, the use of virtualized resources is growing rapidly. These resources are increasingly delivered by multiple converged infrastructures, e.g. clouds that combine server, storage, and network resources from different providers. Such development requires careful re-thinking of the trust framework used between providers. As the scale and complexity of virtualization grows, so does the complexity of authorizing resource chains that are arranged across multiple providers. This type of authorization requires pre-establishment of trust relationships between providers and arranging some level of power. This paper studies the roles of trust and power when considering the requirements of authorization protocol exchanges between providers. Establishing power in the form of impersonal rules is a key element to conduce the necessary trust between providers. The Service Provider Group (SPG) is a way to arrange such power. The SPG framework provides a way to organize thinking about multi-provider services and can be used to describe emerging collaborations such as those found within the realm of optical network service provisioning.