Technical Contracts

Panlab offers a transparent marketplace where customers may book and combine service offerings by various providers in an arbitrary manner. Ensuring a basic compatibility of all available resources and the provisioning of accurate information for testbed creation is the core task of the PII office. Access to the services available in PII is granted by agreeing to the general terms and conditions for using PII’s services (see document D1.3 for details) that become part of a long-term contract between the PII office and any customer or provider. These long-term contracts regulate PII’s service offerings with respect to the customers and providers utilizing the PII framework and lay the foundation for any further testing contracts. In PII the following contract types exist:

• A federation contract is defined between the PII federation and any external entity, either acting as customer or provider. It defines all rights and obligations of the PII members and is characterized by being a long-term stable contractual relation. A federation contract comprises interconnection and testing contracts.
• An interconnection contract defines general rights and obligations of a partner joining the Panlab federation. With signing the interconnection contract the new partner commits himself in establishing a suitable organization to fulfill the minimum requirements defined by the Panlab in terms of maintenance, accuracy of service provisioning, fault management, etc.
• A testing contract defines short-term testing sessions as agreed by a customer and a (set of) provider(s). Each testing contract comprises a technical annex (technical session contract) that defines the technical instantiation. PII uses this technical annex for deploying the agreed testing session.