| Policy-based network management promises to deliver a high degree of automation for military network manage-ment. A policy-based network management system pro-vides the capability to express networking requirements in the form of policies and have them automatically realized in the network, without requiring further manual updates. However, as with every technology, these benefits come at the expense of certain obvious risks. The biggest risk asso-ciated with policy-based management is that the policies themselves can interact in undesirable ways, by causing conflicting actions to be taken by the management system. Thus it is essential that policies be analyzed for conflicts, and that mechanisms be put in place for determining how to resolve these conflicts. A number of policy conflict reso-lution techniques have been described in the literature; however, they often concentrate on the abstract problem of formal policy analysis and have very little to do with prac-tical policy conflict resolution in live management systems. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in policy conflict detection and resolution, followed by a critical look at what is really needed to resolve practical policy conflicts in network management systems. The premise of this paper is that application-specific policy conflict detection and resolution can mostly be addressed by careful policy writing (or re-writing), rather than via cumbersome and unrealistically complex policy conflict resolution solutions. |
| Dr. Ritu Chadha is Chief Scientist and Director of the Policy Management research group in Applied Research at Telcordia Technologies, where she has been working since 1992. She is the Chief Engineer for Telcordia's Future Combat Systems (FCS) Network Management System subcontract with Northrop Grumman, where she is leading the development of a policy-based network management system for ad hoc networks for the U.S. Army. She has managed multiple field demonstrations of network management systems for ad hoc networks developed by her team at Telcordia.
Dr. Chadha received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991. Her research interests include policy-based management, network and service management for IP-based networks, ad hoc networking, directory-based management systems, and automated reasoning. |