Abstract:
Autonomic behaviours in network operations will alleviate
much of the labour intensive and error prone interventions of today's
complex networks. The Service Provider must, be able to manage the
infrastructure and services at an abstract level, focusing on what the
desired behaviour should be rather than how it might be specifically
achieved. Policy-Based Network Management (PBNM) appears as one
of the leading mechanismsto describe desired behaviours and abstract
the programmability of an autonomic network infrastructure to the Service
Provider. For massive-scale and complex networks, the current understanding
of the Higher Level to Lower Level (HL-LL) refinement
process commonly used in PBNM today is not completely effective.One
problem encountered is the need to provide u bind mechanism between
Higher Level and Lower Level policy specifications such that cross-layer
policy requests in the policy continuum can be made by lower policy layers
in a dynamic policy refinement cycle (LL-HL--LL).In this paper,
we illustrate the problem with a policy-based simple admission control
(SAC) application. We then show that policy specifications with a join
operator (ec) simplify the SAC specification. We also investigate the
performance considerations of this enhancement in Internet size applications.
Our future goal is to provide a policy inference engine that can
support complex specifications appropriate for PUNM systems that support
autonomic behaviours in large networks,made of Network elements
with realistic memory and processing constraints.
