Towards a Unified Policy Language for Future Communication Networks: A Process

This paper describes an effort to develop an integrated set of ontologies for the particular sub-domains of network communication and a formal language, common to all the sub-domains, capable of expressing domain specific policies. Principal among these is the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) domain. This effort is led by the Software Defined Radio Forum MLM Work Group, with participation from DARPA and the IEEE Standards Coordinating Committee 41 (SCC 41). The focus of this paper is a description of the process by which this effort is carried out. The main goals of the paper are to provide the motivation for the effort with respect to DSA, describe the process being used, and promote participation of the wider networking community in the described activities.