NetQOS Policy based Management of Heterogeneous Networks for Guaranteed QoS

The NetQOS project is concerned with the design and development of a policy based network management architecture. The proposed approach maps requirements and preferences from the actors of the system – the users, service providers, applications, and the operator – into network and transport level policies and enforces them. In the course of time, changes in the operational environment emerge due to many reasons like the mobility of users, varying service demands, altered QoS requirements etc. The automation of the policy management allows for the system to autonomously adapt to these changes. Equally, a suboptimal QoS delivery and resource utilization triggers an adaptation of the employed policies. The proposed approach modifies existing policies, activates / deactivates existing policies and assembles new policies at run-time while respecting the requirements imposed from the different actors.

The main contribution of Salzburg Research is the provisioning of the monitoring and measurement (MoMe) infrastructure. It is an important part of the system as it provides input for the policy evaluation, validation and adaptation components and thus has a strong influence on the automated decision process. The key feature of the MoMe infrastructure lies in the ability to assimilate an arbitrary number of low-level MoMe tools.

On the basis of these tools MoMe scenarios can be specified and executed through a unified interface. A developer API enables a very simplistic integration of new/existing tools into the infrastructure.