Policy-Driven Traffic Engineering for Intra-domain Quality of Service Provisioning

Given the emergence of IP networks and the Internet as the multiservice network of the future, it is plausible to consider its use for transporting demanding traffic with high bandwidth and low delay and packet loss requirements. Emerging technologies for scalable quality of service such as Differentiated Services and MPLS can be used for premium quality traffic. We are looking at the problem of intra-domain provisioning in an automated manner from an Internet Service Provider’s (ISPs) point of view, i.e. we want to satisfy the contracts with our customers while optimising the use of the network resources. We need to be able to dynamically guide the behaviour of such an automated provisioning system in order to be able to meet the high-level business objectives. The emerging policy-based management paradigm is the means to achieve this requirement. In this paper we devise first a non-linear programming formulation of the traffic engineering problem and show that we can achieve the objectives and meet the requirements of demanding customer traffic through the means of an automated provisioning system. We extend the functionality of the automated system through policies. We define resource provisioning policies, and we present example scenarios of their enforcement.