Detecting and Resolving Policy Conflicts

The policy-based approach has been an important means of managing distributed systems and networks. However, conflicts can cause undesirable system behaviors. Accoreing to the protocol levels on which they are acting, policies are classified into the application level and the network level. Based on the two-level policy architecture, the origins of policy conflicts are explored, and the algorithms of detecting and resolving the inconsistencies between policies are surveyed. Then the benefits and shortcomings of these methods are investigated. Finally, some of the future research directions and open problems are discussed.