How to implement complex policies on existing network infrastructure

Abstract

Transport networks satisfy requests to forward data in a given topology. At the level of a network element, forwarding decisions are defned by flows. To implement desired data properties during forwarding, a network operator imposes economic models by applying policies to flows, ideally without dealing with underlying resource constraints. Policy splitting over multiple network elements under resource constraints is a hard optimization problem [6, 7]. We discuss limitations of the proposed methods and existing Boolean minimization techniques. The major contribution of this work is an optimal solution with linear time complexity at the price of a single bit forwarded in every packet. The results are supported by a comprehensive evaluation study that compares previous and currently proposed methods.