Policy-based network dimensioning for IP differentiated services networks

Given the emergence of IP networks and the Internet as the multi-service network of the future, it is plausible to consider its use for transporting demanding traffic with high bandwidth and low delay and packet loss requirements. Emerging technologies for scalable quality of service such as differentiated services (DiffServ) and MPLS can be used for premium quality traffic. We look at the problem of intra-domain provisioning in an automated manner from the point of view of an Internet service provider (ISP), i.e. we want to satisfy the contracts with our customers while optimizing the use of network resources. We also need to be able to guide the behavior of such an automated provisioning system dynamically in order to be able to meet the high-level business objectives. The emerging policy-based management paradigm is the means to achieve this requirement. We devise first a nonlinear programming formulation of the traffic engineering problem and show that we can achieve the objectives and meet the requirements of demanding customer traffic through the means of an automated provisioning system. We extend the functionality of the automated system through policies. Finally, we present example scenarios of the enforcement of network dimensioning policies.