Design and implementation of a policy-based resource management architecture

Policy-based management can guide the behavior of a network or distributed system through high-level declarative directives that are dynamically introduced, checked for consistency, refined and evaluated, resulting typically in a series of low-level actions. We actually view policies as a means of extending the functionality of management systems dynamically, in conjunction with pre-existing "hard-wired" management logic. In this paper, we first discuss the policy management aspects of a resource management architecture for IP Differentiated Services networks and we focus on the functionality of the network dimensioning component. We then present a detailed description of the design and implementation of the components of the policy management sub-system needed to be deployed in order to make our system policy-driven. Finally, we present examples of network dimensioning policies describing their transformation from their definition by the operator until their enforcement.