Towards the Policy Refinement Problem in Policy-based Management Systems

Policy-based management was promoted as a solution to provide flexibility to dynamically assign network resources, control QoS and security, by means of administratively specified rules. Reality has showed that policy is a methodology hard to implement and has not yet been widespread used. In addition to policy conflict analysis, a key issue for this reticence is the need to derive enforceable policies from high-level administrative directives, namely the policy refinement problem. This book provides a holistic view of this process, from formal analysis to its practical realization, identifying the key elements involved in each step of such critical process. For instance this book proposes a refinement framework and advances the state of the art providing a methodology to address policy refinement in network management contexts. Finally, taking intra-domain Quality of Service Management as background domain this book presents the execution of a complete refinement process in an affordable manner. This book should help policy designers and practitioners to address the refinement problem in different application domains of Communications, Informatics and Economical Management.

Autorentext

Javier Rubio-Loyola is a Visiting Professor in Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Collaborator in Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He holds a PhD in Telecommunications from UPC. Dr. Loyola has contributed to Spanish and IST-European projects. His research interests focus on network management, autonomic networking, and service engineering.