Assuring Brokerage Quality in the Cloud–Edge Continuum

The Cloud–Edge Continuum (CEC) has emerged as a paradigm for distributing computational resources across cloud, fog, and edge layers, enabling latency-sensitive applications to operate efficiently. However, ensuring the quality of service (QoS) brokerage in such environments remains a challenge. Existing frameworks primarily focus on resource management techniques such as allocation, scheduling, and offloading but fail to address the quality assurance of the brokerage process itself. This paper introduces SLA governance as a means of ensuring the quality of service brokerage by validating—through automated reasoning—Service Level Agreements (SLAs) against meta-quality constraints—high-level policies that define permissible QoS conditions. We propose an ontology-driven approach leveraging the ODRL ontology for SLA representation and capturing meta-quality constraints. Our method also enables introspective reasoning ensuring internal SLA consistency. Additionally, we integrate SLA governance with a real-time monitoring framework, the Event Management System (EMS), to continuously track workload performance and trigger SLA adaptation when necessary. This integration ensures that SLA-based brokerage decisions remain dynamic and context-aware.