Rule-Based Building-Block Architectures for Policy-Based Networking

  • Authors:

  • Yasusi Kanada;Brian J. O'keefe

  • Affiliations:

  • Systems Development Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd., Totsuka-ku Yoshida-cho 292, Yokohama 244–/0817, Japan/ kanada@sdl.hitachi.co.jp;Hewlett-Packard Company, 3404 East Harmony Road, Ft. Collins, Colorado 80528–/9599/ brian.okeefe@hp.com

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Network and Systems Management
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We developed two rule-based building-block architectures, i.e., pipe-connection and label-connection architectures, for describing complex and structured policies, especially network QoS policies. This study focuses on the latter. The relationships or connections between building blocks are specified by the data flow and control flow between them. The data flow is specified by tags, including virtual flow labels (VFLs), which are data attached to “outside packets.” The control flow can be classified and specified by four control structures: concatenation, parallel application, selection, and repetition. We have designed fine-grained and coarse-grained building blocks and methods for specifying data flow and control flow in differentiated services (Diffserv), and implemented the coarse-grained ones in a policy server. Two cases of building-block use are described, and we concluded that there are five advantages of building-block-based policies, i.e., expressibility, uniform semantics, simplicity, flexibility, and management-task-oriented design. We also developed techniques for transforming building-block policies into executable ones, which are called policy division and fusion.