Policy-based hybrid management architecture for IP-based VPN

Using IP-based Virtual Private Network (IP-VPN) technology, a company can establish its virtual private network over public networks. Recently, IP-VPN emerges as one of main technologies for increasing business competitiveness with reasonable costs. The standards for IP-VPN are currently being developed by Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETF) and others. In this paper, we identify the limitations of current standard of IETF for the global policy management. We propose a new policy-based hybrid management architecture for IP-VPN services which makes a use of a centralized global management server. A global poilcy is classified into a set of levels depending on the administrator’s authority. The procedures for automatically verifying, decorrelating, and resolving the global policies have been designed for the various policy levels by extending mntner class and policy class of Security Policy Specification Language (SPSL). Finally, we have built a prototype of VPN service management system to demonstrate the functionality.