Policy Manager

The policy manager is responsible for providing easy to use interface to define, modify and view policies. The policy manager takes a higher level view of policies that are convenient to the user, and translates it to more precise schema-specific routines that would be supported at the policy repository.

The higher level view offered by the policy manager allows the server administrator to define a number of class of services. Each class of service is associated with a specific performance requirements. The administrator specifies which of its applications or clients is to be mapped to each class of service.

The policy manager software translates the higher level policies into detailed policy information. It maps the different performance requirements into the different PHB (Per Hop Behavior) aggregate offered by the network, and checks the feasibility of satisfying all the performance requirements. It also verifies that all policy definitions are consistent with each other.

The policy management software has been developed as a 100% Java application, and uses XML as the base format for specifying high-level policy information. The architecture of the policy management software is as illustrated in the figure below. The architecture has been designed to accommodate for variations in user interfaces and changing policy schemas, while providing a base for general policy consistency, validation and translation logic.