IEEE Infocom 2006 The First IEEE Workshop on

“Adaptive Policy-based Management in Network Management and Control"

The First IEEE Workshop on "Adaptive Policy-based Management in Network Management and Control"

In Conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM 2006
Barcelona, Spain, 28 April 2006

General Co-Chairs:

Dimitri Papadimitriou  Alcatel Bell,
Belgium
 dimitri.papadimitriou@alcatel.be
Monika Jaeger
T-Systems, Germany
monika.jaeger@t-systems.com

 

Description

In future control plane driven multilayer networks, the management system will continue to provide FCAPS functions, but some of these functions will be overlapping between the control plane and the management plane, such as performance management, path computation through layers, and connection management. A consolidated tool framework must close the gap between the Operator’s high-level Network Engineering and Traffic Engineering (TE) objectives and fine granular TE actions taken by the control plane.

Policy-based Management (PBM) is an enabling technology for controlling large-scale distributed systems, and for enforcing operational coherency through policy rules. PBM enforces admission conditions into distributed Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) environments, IP networks, and plays a key role during the actual service provisioning, management, and real-time performance monitoring of services. PBM enable network administrators to operate their network through rule-based policies. The latter are translated automatically into individual device configuration directives, aiming at controlling a network as a whole. Programmability of control plane from the management system allows adaptation to emerging requirements, and subsequently dynamic behavior adaptation of IP/MPLS Label Switching Routers (LSR) to support additional functionality such as TE.

Two IETF Working Groups have considered policy networking: The Resource Allocation Protocol (RAP) and a common open policy-based admission control protocol for use between Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) and Policy Decision Points (PDP) referred to as Common Open Policy Service (COPS) [RFC 2748]. The IETF has also produced a framework for representing, managing, sharing, and reusing policies in a vendor independent, interoperable, and scalable manner. It has also defined an extensible information model for representing policies, called the Policy Core Information Model (PCIM) and an extension to this model to address QoS management, called the QoS Policy Information Model (QPIM).

However, policies defined and processed centrally in the Policy Decision Point (PDP) and enforced locally via Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) apply on a per LSR basis and have several drawbacks including the impossibility of adapting to network condition when applying these rules. When using PBM for controlling the node behavior according to network-wide resource and traffic-oriented Traffic Engineering this adaptive property becomes a major requirement. From this perspective, adaptive policy-based management (A-PBM) is defined to provide efficient collaboration to resources, tools, and databases in the management plane (concentrating on off-line tasks) and control plane (concentrating on real-time tasks) for seamless, automated, and cost efficient resource and traffic-oriented TE.

This one-day workshop will challenge existing concepts, identify upcoming requirements and pioneer new orientations for A-PBM. This workshop will provide the opportunity to confront several orientations and solutions, compare and position them against legacy policy models, mechanisms and deployments. This workshop will provide an international technical forum for experts to exchange ideas and present results of ongoing research and activities in the area of PBM.

Call for papers