An introduction to policy management

• Authors: J. A. Clark;J. McDonald
• Venue: BT Technology Journal
• Year: 2005

Policy management is an all-encompassing term that describes how the QoS policies applied to a network would be managed. This paper illustrates the complexity of policy management, and goes on to explain how the end result of installing a new network policy only happens after a range of both business and network rules are followed. Business rules check that the requested policy is permitted under the customer's agreed service package and other non-network variables such as the time of day, while network rules include access control functions that check the network has sufficient free capacity before admitting the new policy. Various examples illustrate the importance of co-ordinating policies across the network and that the most appropriate policy is installed in the first place. Poor policy management may result in a next generation network appearing to offer a worse quality of service than the completely best-effort network it is replacing.