An automated policy-based management framework for differentiated communication systems

This paper presents a novel paradigm to approach the issue of autonomous policy-based management of wired/wireless differentiated communication systems. In contrast to existing management approaches which require static a priori policy configurations, policies are created dynamically. The proposed framework addresses the management issue from a new perspective through posing it as a problem of learning from current system behavior, while creating new policies at runtime in response to changing requirements. A hierarchical policy model is used to capture users and administrators' higher level goals into network level objectives. Given sets of network objectives and constraints, policies are assembled at runtime. The new approach gives more flexibility to users and applications to dynamically change their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements while maintaining a smooth delivery of QoS through network monitors feedback. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed work.