A Survey of Policy Refinement Methods as a Support for Sustainable Networks

摘要

Green sustainability-oriented features have become common in network nodes and protocols. Running a network in an energy-efficient way is an important concern of network operators and datacenter networks. The implementation and coordination of the myriad of existing network features poses a challenging task. The energy efficiency capabilities must be selected according to the network conditions and can be combined to increase energy savings. However, they can conflict if not orchestrated in a proper manner. Policy-Based Network Management is a well-known approach to addressing the complexity of network management tasks. In conjunction with a refinement process to translate high-level policies down to low-level policies, it can bring business directives to the network, including sustainability goals. In this survey, we identify the major characteristics of sustainability-oriented policies, as well as the requirements a policy refinement method for such type of policies has to fulfill, including energy efficiency capabilities orchestration. We then analyze existing policy refinement techniques and discuss the challenges on how they address or need to be modified in order to be applicable to sustainability-oriented policies.