Applying the policy concept to the management of ATM networks

The introduction of sophisticated processing capabilities within current networks allows to provide more advanced services to users and a high level of customization. This has led to the need of an integrated management of network, system and application resources. Furthermore, the large number and diversity of the resources to be managed in such processing and communication environments stressed the need for an automated management support to deal with the increasing complexity. This integrated and automated management is based largely upon high level architectural concepts such as management policies. This paper discusses the application of such architectural aspects for the automated management of very high speed networks. The goal is to reduce the control and management delays which are very critical in such environments. In particular a hierarchical domain structure a recursive policy-based activity are proposed for the real-time management of an ATM switch which is the basic network element of B-ISDN.