TABLE OF CONTENTS In familiar usage, policies are procedural statements expressing administrative conventions that are adopted by various organizational entities. The concept of automatic policy management of resources has its commercial roots in the administration of information systems and networks. Policy management refers to a particular approach for automating network management activities by specifying organizational objectives that can be interpreted and enforced by the network itself. The automatic application of management policies provides flexibility to change the configuration of network devices at run-time to satisfy administrative goals and constraints regarding security, resource allocation, application priorities, or quality of service (QoS). A "policy engine" is a program or process that is able to ingest machine-readable policies and apply them to a particular problem domain to constrain the behavior of network resources.
This chapter concerns the application of policy management to cognitive radio technology in general, and to spectrum management for frequencyagile radios in particular. It focuses on what lessons can be learned from prior applications of policy management to network resource problems. It reviews and leverages previous standards, research, and commercial implementations for policy engines and applies them to the architecture and design of policy engines for cognitive radios.
The policy engine is the main inference component that triggers responses to events that require changing the resource configuration. Often the output of the policy engine amounts to configuration commands or...
