OASIS: Proposed Policy Aggregation Submission

["John Storrie" <storrie@nortel.com>]

Title: OASIS: Proposed Policy Aggregation Submission

Hi all,

I have been researching the topic planned for the policy model which had been outlined in the past few conference calls and after looking at various specifications and working with some subject matter experts I am coming to the conclusion that this may well be covered off by other pre-existing specifications.

Issue

A service is defined that is made up of a number of pre-built components, where each component has been provided by multiple companies. Each component has defined its deployment policy information and this is incorporated into the component and is available for inspection by the entity assembling these components in to the composite service.

It is feasible that each component provider may have requested a policy to be applied to the network to aid the execution or deployment of that individual component. It is probable that these policy requests may indeed be duplicated and may cause issues when multiple requests to the policy enforcement or decision points are made.

Example: A service provider has defined a service that manages the uplink bandwidth to allow the transfer of data from the addressed endpoint to reduce the transfer time. The intent of the service was to increase the uplink bandwidth just before transfer and return it to the pre-service rate after transfer completes. The service is made up of several components, each from a separate vendor and each of which will alter the bandwidth as those components come into execution context so it is possible that the overall service may fail or behave in an inconsistent manner as each component alters the uplink bandwidth.

An examination of the composite services' policy would identify that this was the case and alter the policy to effect the service in the most efficient manner.

Investigation

There are a number of areas such as OMA's PEEM. Policy Evaluation Enforcement Management, specifications, W3C WS-Policy, TeleManagement Forum and others that have to some extent started or at least have scoped some of this.

OMA PEEM

It looks like the PEEM descriptions in the AD document seems to imply that this form of policy inspection and aggregation takes place at least implicitly rather than explicitly.

W3C WS-Policy

Within the area of WS-Policy reference http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-policy/, section 4.5 Policy Intersection seems to allow the inspection of policy from multiple providers and the creation of a common policy model that would contain that information.

I am sure that I have probably missed other specifications bodies but it would seem, at least at a first pass, that this capability to inspect and aggregate policy information is at least covered.

So, perhaps I need some guidance here to determine if there is any mileage in this submission, as it looks like it is not a "gap".

Regards John