Unified policy management in Next Generation Networks

Telecommunication networks are evolving towards unified next generation networks (NGN). Policy control is included in different subsystems of NGN to provide customized control of service delivery depending on different factors. Many management challenges rise considering the intrinsic heterogeneity of the different sub-domains where policy control is to be applied. Each of the current proposed policy architectures in the main NGN standardization bodies has specific design to address its specific sub-domain. This means a converged operator should have to implement and manage all these components to obtain desired granularity of control, which translates to elevated costs with infrastructure deployment and operation. This paper analyses the feasibility and possible advantages of unified policy management. It describes policy usage in 3GPP and in OMA and proposes a common policy description language and a unified repository that can be used in the different NGN layers to facilitate policy enforcement and deployment. Implementation in a real testbed is also included.