A policy based framework for software defined optical networks

The Network Management System (NMS) consists of Management Information Base (MIB) objects that enable policy based monitoring and management of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) infrastructure. The emerging technological architecture of Software Defined Networks (SDN) is related to the NMS on the north-bound interface and the concept of policy control is central to SDN. Therefore, much effort has been focused on policy languages and abstractions tailored to SDN. This paper presents a context-aware policy framework that allows network operators to have dynamic functionality of policy management in SDN. The proposed scheme has been validated in a SDN controller supporting NMS with a new MIB schema. Our use cases and experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed policy based framework incorporating a simulation-assisted pre-setting mechanism for local policy decisions in cases where there are issues when communicating with the SDN controller.