A policy management framework using traffic engineering in diffserv networks

Abstract

The increasing growth and complexity of current corporate networks calls for higher level models and tools for managing network resources. In this sense, Service Level Management represents an important recent shift in system management. Furthermore, recently the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) DiffServ working group, has defined an architecture for implementing scalable service differentiation in the Internet, where network resources are allocated to traffic streams by service provisioning policies. This work presents and evaluates a functional architecture and a framework for mapping service management policies and constraints into DiffServ mechanisms. Various simulation scenarios described through the use of service policies are introduced and analyzed. It is shown that the use of service level management allows for efficient dynamic traffic engineering of DiffServ backbones. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.