Overview

Policy-based management has been proposed in recent years as a suitable means for managing Quality of Service (QoS) in IP networks. Yet despite research projects, standardisation efforts, and substantial interest from industry, policy-based management is still not a reality. There are some vendor tools, mostly part of virtual private network provisioning toolsets, but policy-based management is still far from being widely adopted despite its potential benefits of flexibility and constrained programmability. One of the reasons for the reticence to adopt this technology is that it is difficult to analyse policies to determine that they will actually work given the capabilities of managed network devices, and to guarantee the stability of the network configuration given that policies may have conflicts leading to unpredictable effects.

This project will attempt to address the problems of policy analysis, including conflict detection and validation, and policy refinement using QoS management for IP networks as an application-specific demonstrator. Our overall goal is to make use of the complementary expertise of the Imperial and Surrey groups to integrate formal analysis techniques with policy specification, policy deployment and QoS management techniques for IP networks.

Full Proposal (PDF) >