NETQOS project proposes development of an autonomous policy-based QoS management for wired/wireless heterogeneous communications networks aimed to provide enhanced end-to-end QoS and efficient resource utilisation. The proposed approach assembles policies at run-time under sets of imposed constraints and goals, based on learning and context identification. The automation of network level policy management allows for dynamic adaptation of the managed system in response to changing requirements of the operational environment while coping with the originally imposed business objectives. The new approach gives more flexibility to users and applications to dynamically change their Quality of service (QoS) requirements while maintaining a smooth delivery of the required QoS.

The project will address the architecture, protocols, access technologies, configuration, dynamic QoS and resource allocation, and distributed management schemes in achieving the project objectives. Management of communication systems refers to the task of configuring, administering and optimizing the network resources. One aspect of management that best exemplifies the magnitude of those challenges is encountered in QoS provisioning. QoS management refers to the activities in QoS specification, negotiation, monitoring and control of network resources to meet end-to- end users and applications requirements, business objectives and resources availability. The notion of predefined policies has been introduced as a promising solution to address the needs for automated adaptation and optimisation of QoS, traffic and resources.

The NETQOS project proposes an autonomous self-adaptable policy-based management framework with inherent dynamic capabilities to best manage, customize and extend the underlying complex infrastructure of communication systems resources in response to the continuously changing business objectives and users requirements. Different kinds of interacting policies, such as transport and resource usage for network management are collected and automatically processed to ensure  QoS guarantees according to SLA. For efficient QoS adaptation, the policy framework has to be defined considering events and patterns obtained from monitoring, measurement and modelling systems.
The NETQOS system framework so developed will be implemented in a testbed environment and will be validated, before extending its development into operational network. The results will be disseminated widely among interested stakeholders and will be contributed to standards and industry forums appropriately.

Following activities constitutes the research activities of NETQOS

• Requirements for policy based architecture and business scenarios based on analysis of current solutions and state-of-the-art
• Design of autonomous self-adaptable hierarchical policy-based management architecture
• Implementation of a prototype for policy based management
• Integration and demonstration of components and architecture
• Evaluation and validation of the policy based management system