Hierarchical Handling of UNI/E-NNI Policy Data

The OIF UNI and E-NNI allow the autonomous setup, maintenance, and deletion of transport connections across the domains of one or more network operators. At demarcation points, policies determine whether a particular connection request is permissible. The OIF Implementation Agreements demand that such decisions are to be based upon policy data supplied by the originator of a connection request, usually some end-user. Between peering network operators, however, bilaterally negotiated Service Level Agreements determine whether a connection request may be routed across a downstream domain, which needs different policy data to be supplied. Since this aspect is not sufficiently reflected in the OIF Implementation Agreements, this paper proposes a refinement to OIF UNI/E-NNI policy specifications that both takes policy changes at demarcation points and layered network architectures into account.