Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Policy-Driven Routing Management Using CIM
Félix J. García Clemente, Jesús D. Jiménez Re, Gregorio Martínez Pérez,
and Antonio F. Gómez Skarmeta
Departamento de Ingeniería de la Información y las Comunicaciones,
University of Murcia, Spain
{fgarcia, jdjimenez, gregorio, skarmeta}@dif.um.es
Abstract.
Policy-based network management is intended to provide a
system-wide and unified view of the network and its services and applications.
This includes the combined management of network services as different as
security, QoS or routing. However, while for IPsec and QoS there are clear
models to define the semantics that a policy specification or language should
implement, this is not equally true in the case of routing policies. This paper is
intended to provide some results on the definition, modelling and deployment
of routing policies using the Common Information Model (CIM). We also
present the most relevant details of the implementation of our policy-driven
routing management system, which has been successfully tested and used for
the configuration of several relevant IPv6 IXes deployed as part of the three
years Euro6IX (European IPv6 Internet Exchanges Backbone) EU IST research
and deployment project.
1 Introduction and Motivation
One of the main goals of policy-based management is to enable network, service and
application control and management at a high abstraction layer. Using a policy
language, the administrator specifies rules that describe domain-wide policies which
are independent of the implementation of the particular network node, service and/or
application. It is, then, the policy management architecture that provides support to
transform and distribute the policies to each node and thus enforce a consistent
configuration in all the elements involved. This is a prerequisite for achieving a mean
to dynamically constrain and regulate the behaviour of a system without the human
cooperation.
Researchers have proposed multiple approaches for task-specific policy
representation. They range from formal policy languages that a computer can easily
and directly process and interpret, to rule-based policy notation using an if-then-else
format.
The IETF provides information models for specifying policies that are independent
of any implementation or encoding. In this sense, the IPsec Configuration Policy
Information Model [1] presents an object-oriented information model for IP Security
(IPsec) policies and the QoS Policy Information Model (QPIM) [2] presents a similar
model for QoS policies. Both information models are based on the core policy classes
defined in the Policy Core Information Model (PCIM) [3] and in the Policy Core
