Business-Driven Management of Policies in DiffServ Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a framework to control the life cycle of enforceable policies aligned to business directives. The framework relies on three main aspects: the formalization of measurable business indicators underpinning the management cycle of policies, a holistic approach to conceal Quality of Service delivery with business alignment, and the use of policy-based management as the vehicle to control system behavior accordingly. The core contribution of this research lies in the network management area whose most widespread solutions for QoS delivery have been systematically decoupled from business value, although the research community recognizes business profit as the main motivation for any management solution. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a management framework that allows exploiting business value in telecommunications infrastructures. As each application domain may have intrinsic peculiarities we propose to validate our approach in the context of DiffServ networks. Simulations will be conducted to evaluate and to optimize the performance of diverse business directives under different patterns of service invocations and patterns of inter-domain traffic exchange between autonomous systems. To the best of our knowledge no other approach has dealt with the above research area in such a holistic view.