A semantic active policy-based management architecture

The task of managing information technology resources becomes increasingly complex as managers must take heterogeneous systems, different networking technologies, and distributed applications into consideration. Policy-based networking (PBN) has emerged as a promising paradigm for configuration management and service provisioning. The common open policy service (COPS) and its extension for policy provisioning (COPS-PR) are currently being developed as the protocols to implement PBN. This paper describes an active policy-based network management architecture which demonstrates how a policy-based management approach can be adapted into an active node framework. For this purpose, we defined and deployed a policy-based management protocol, in conformity to the COPS protocol, in order to exchange policy information between a policy server and its clients. Our implementation is done on a Web services based active network platform named ASWA. This paper also proposes a new approach for the definition of network policy management information, in order to enhance its semantic expressiveness and facilitate its maintenance, by using OWL the Web ontology language.