Developing policy hierarchies for an effective distributed systems and network management: a case study in a videoconference service

Large-scale distribution systems and network management depend on complex relationships that are strongly related to the managerial roles, which depend on the management policies set. Management policies express peer-to-peer or hierarchical management relationships which constitute the policy hierarchies. Policy hierarchies must satisfy at the highest management level, the business goals, while the complex relationships between policies must be analysed for avoiding conflicts, developing in parallel synergy, strategic convergence, and optimisation of policy usage. This paper proposes an integrated approach for constructing policy hierarchies. A generic policy refinement framework is presented as a crucial factor for a successful policy hierarchy construction. The policy hierarchy analysis functionality is defined, providing a respective software tool in Prolog. The high applicability of the proposed approach is depicted in a case study concerning the management of a videoconference service.