Policy Processing: Don´t Take it for Granted

The new advanced services and limitations of current Internet have driven a lot of initiatives in architectures for future Internet. Ambient networks is one of these initiatives, focused in providing a seamless cooperation of resources in an environment with a multitude of access technologies, network operators and business actors. There are many efforts using policy based management as a practical solution for addressing the challenges for the management of future Internet such as cross-domain management, integration and manipulation of data across the world, seamless mobility, reliability, performance and heterogeneity support. However, not much attention has been given to the policy processing itself. In this paper we present our policy processing system, currently used in the PBMAN project, a policy based management architecture and prototype for Ambient Networks. The primary contribution of this paper is to give real attention to the components of policy systems that can determine its performance as well as its successful adoption.