A Dimensioning and Deployment Tool for on Demand Policy-Based Resource Management System

Today the Policy-Based Management (PBM) approach is recognized as an efficient solution to simplify the complex task of managing and controlling networks. To this end, the IETF has introduced a reference framework to build PBM systems. However, this framework only addresses the provisioning of relatively long validity period services based on pre-defined SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Furthermore, very little work addresses the scalability properties of the instantiation of this framework in a real network. In our previous work, we presented an extension of the IETF PBM framework in order to support dynamic provisioning of short term services (end-system signaling) as well as an instantiation scheme that is scalable (distributed provisioning of edge routers). This instantiation scheme is based on the distribution of the provisioning process while keeping centralized only the parts that involve critical resources, namely the Bandwidth Brokerage. In this paper, we propose an extensive analytical study of this extended architecture. The results of this work are intended to be used as a guideline to help network operators to design a scalable PBM system in order to offer to their customers' services with QoS assurance in an on-demand basis.