Apex: An engine for dynamic adaptive policy execution

The advent of “Soft Networking”, where networks are composed of virtual nodes and links, promises to dramatically ease the definition and deployment of networks whilst allowing network applications that are limited only by the imagination of the developers of those applications. In such a dynamic environment, the Autonomic Management pattern supervised by policies has been recognised as holding more promise for management of Soft Networks than traditional techniques. We have proposed Dynamic Adaptive Policies as an approach to give classic policies the dynamicity and flexibility to manage such networks and whatever applications are running on them. In this paper, we describe our ongoing work on Apex, an engine that executes and administers Dynamic Adaptive Policies in a scalable and distributed manner.