| Besides providing network management, it has become essential to offer different Quality of Service (QoS) in networks. Policy-based Management provides control on network routers to achieve this goal. The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed a two-tier architecture, which has several limitations such as scalability and cross-vendor hardware compatibility. To address these issues, this thesis presents a functionally enhanced multi-tier policy management architecture design framework—Unified Policy-based Management (UPM). Several extensions are introduced; in particular, an intermediate agent entity between the policy server and policy repository. By keeping internal data in a common format, using a standard protocol, and by interpreting and translating request and decision messages from multi-vendor hardware, this agent allows a dynamic Unified Information Model throughout the architecture. This information system allows executions of policy rules with dynamic addition of equipment at run-time. A prototype based upon UPM has been built, and performance evaluation results are presented. |
