Subject: WG ACTION: Policy Framework (policy)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 17:59:31 -0400

A new working group has been formed in the General Area of the IETF.
For additional information, contact the Area Directors or the WG Chair.

Policy Framework (policy)
-------------------------

 Current Status: Active Working Group
 
 Chair(s):
     Ed Ellesson <[email-masked]>
     John C. Strassner <[email-masked]>
 
 General Area Director(s): 
     Fred Baker  <[email-masked]>
 
 General Area Advisor: 
     Fred Baker  <[email-masked]>
 
 Mailing Lists: 
     General Discussion:[email-masked]
     To Subscribe:      [email-masked]
         In Body:       subscribe
     Archive:           http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/maillist/policy
 
Description of Working Group:
 
Problem Statement:

There is a need to represent, manage, and share policies and policy
information in a vendor-independent, interoperable, scalable manner. The 
goal of this working group is to provide a framework that will meet 
these needs, along with specific schemata using that framework. These 
schemata will be used specifically for QoS traffic management. A 
secondary goal of this framework is to show that this general
development process can be extended to other application domains.

Objectives:

The objectives of this working group are to:

1. Define a secure framework for policy definition and administration
   for a heterogeneous set of Policy Enforcement Points. The framework
   will be shown to be able to represent and manage policy information
   in an unambiguous, interoperable manner in a single administrative
   domain. It is assumed that this domain is controlled by a single
   Policy Server which uses a directory, accessed by LDAP. Care will be
   taken to ensure that this work is extensible to other types of
   repositories, such as relational databases.

2. Define a common Policy Definition Language (PDL) for translating
   from a business-specification, such as those found in a Service Level
   Agreement, to a set of policies specified in a common 
   vendor-independent intermediate form. This enables policy information 
   to be shared among different vendors' Policy Servers.

3. The framework and PDL will first concentrate on provisioned and
   signaled QoS. Both will then be extended to consider other needs.

4. Once the framework and PDL are defined, schema work can be started.
   This will be an iterative process, and it is possible that once    
   specific schemata are designed, the PDL and/or the framework will be 
   revised.

The first schemata will be for that of QOS administration. This working
group will work with the DiffServ, IntServ, RAP, and ISSLL Working
Groups to develop schemata for both IPv4 and IPv6 for standards track
work. To ensure that security issues are addressed, Russ Mundy will
serve as this working group's security adviser.

5. The charter specifically excludes:
  -discussion of protocols to exchange policy information
  -schema attributes or classes that are vendor-specific (although the
   schema defined in this group will be defined in a way that is
   extensible by specific vendors)

6. There are many areas for future work. One is extending the framework
   to include exchange and management of policy data between 
   heterogeneous policy domains. However, this work is NOT part of this 
   existing Charter.
 
 Goals and Milestones: 
 
   Oct 98       Submit Policy Definition as Internet-Draft                     

   Nov 98       Submit Framework Document and Schema Guidelines Internet-Draft 

   Nov 98       Submit first draft of Combined RSVP/IntServ/ISSLL/DiffServ QOS 
                Schema as I-D                                                  

   Mar 99       Working Group Last Call on Policy Definition to Proposed       

   Mar 99       WG Last Call for FYI RFC                                       

   Jun 99       WG Last Call on QOS Schema for Proposed