An adaptive policy based management framework for differentiated services networks

This paper presents a framework for specifying policies for the management of differentiated services (DiffServ) networks. Although policy-based management has been the subject of intensifying research efforts, the proposed solutions are often restricted to condition-action rules where conditions are matched against incoming traffic flows. This results in static policy configurations where manual intervention is required to cater for configuration changes and to enable policy deployment. The framework presented supports automated policy deployment and flexible event triggers to permit dynamic policy configuration. Whilst current research focuses mostly on rules for low-level device configuration, significant challenges remain to be addressed in order to: 1) provide policy specification and adaptation across different abstraction layers; and 2) provide tools and services for the engineering of policy-driven systems. In particular, this paper focuses on solutions for dynamic adaptation of policy in DiffServ networks according to changes in requirements. Policy adaptation includes both dynamically changing policy parameters and reconfiguring the policy objects.