| Abstract: |
Policy-based network
management is a necessity in large scale management environment. It
provides means for separating high level system requirements from actual
implementations. As the network size increases, the need for automatic
tools to perform management increases rapidly. In Differentiated
Services (DiffServ), policies can be used to dynamically reconfigure
routers such that the desired Quality of Service (QoS) goals are
achieved as well as to perform admission control. Despite its potential
benefits, policy-based management is far from being widely adopted. One
of the reasons behind this is that it is difficult to analyze policies
in order to guarantee configuration stability. Policies configured on
large domains may have conflicts leading to unpredictable effects. We
propose developing a formalization to put these policies in canonical
form that can then aid in detecting and solving conflicts in these
policies configurations. We also present a classification of these
conflicts with respect to their scope and data types involved. Moreover,
we describe a simple method of analyzing the severity of the conflict
based on tunable user sensitivity. |