PRM: A Resource Management Framework for Policy-driven QoS control in enhanced Internets

The Internet has evolved from a traditional best-effort delivery data network into an enhanced Internet that can provide a certain Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms for applications. However, these QoS mechanisms usually do not take policy factors into account such as priority and time-of-day. The paper presents a Resource Management Framework for Policy-driven QoS control (PRM) in enhanced internets, which consists of four components: Domain Policy Controller (DPC) resides an administrator domain, Border Resource Manager (BRM) resides between adjacent domains, Interior Resource Managers (IRM) in each router between two BRMs within the same domain, and Endsystem Resource Manager (ERM) in charge of end-node/host router resources. We first introduce challenges and demands facing the enhanced internets, then give a formalized definition of policy and describe the functions and interaction of components of PRM. Specifically we take QoS-pricing policy used in a Diff-Serv environment as an example to illustrate the operational phases of PRM.