Towards Federated Policy Management

In both data networks and telecommunication networks we are seeing a substantial growth in the number of policy engines and policy-enabled services and applications. We argue that end-users and network operators will need to have a unified, conceptually centralized "view" of the policies that they have specified and a unified understanding of how the policies will play out in the underlying infrastructure. This paper addresses the issue of "federated policy management," which allows users to specify preferences and policies at a high level and uses automated tools to map those preferences and policies into appropriate rule sets running on appropriate policy engines.