Tech Talks

On Declarative Policy Management of Network Communication Systems

Dr. Filip Perich

We describe the design and report on experience fielding an end-to-end framework for declarative policy management of network communication systems. Our approach addresses two fundamental problems: the expensive manual involvement and the intriguing complexity of maintaining aspects of network communication systems. We overcome the challenges by defining a declarative policy language, which aids in automating network management, and by delegating management tasks to policy software components embedded within networking components. The language enables each authority to draft network requirement policies at a user-friendly abstraction level. Each authority defines only objectives and constraints relevant to its needs. The defined information is hardware, software, and protocol independent. The authorities do not focus on writing procedures for configuring a specific infrastructure; instead they focus on describing a generic infrastructure and its features. The policy software components present within or in a reachable vicinity of each networking component employ the policies, which are dynamically merged from applicable authorities, to collaboratively compute steps necessary to reach a desired configuration state and subsequently execute the steps at run-time, thus avoiding long time-to-deployment periods as well as automatically removing configuration inconsistencies. We report on our field framework experimentation of employing the framework for spectrum access control, illustrating the capability offered to network communication systems, their command & control management, and individual radios for enforcing spectrum access policies while enabling the radios to fully utilize available spectrum in comparison to traditional, static-assignment spectrum access methods.