SEMANTIC DETECTION AND RESOLUTION OF CONFLICTS AND REDUNDANCIES IN NETWORK FUNCTION VIRTUALIZATION POLICIES

摘要

Network policies for providing a network service are managed in a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environment. The policies are obtained from service requests and specify placement and lifecycle management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Attribute values are extracted from each policy. The extracted attribute values include at least a policy type value which specifies an action performed by the policy. The policies are grouped based on the attribute values. The policies in the same group share at least a common policy type value. The attribute values are compared within each group to detect conflicts and redundancies before deployment of the network service and in real-time after the network service is deployed. One or more of the obtained policies are removed to produce a policy repository free of the conflicts and the redundancies.