A policy management framework for flow distribution on multihomed end nodes

A multihomed node has several paths with its correspondent, maintained by several multihoming protocols. The decision to route a packet over a specific path relies on filter rules, which result from the comparison between the path's characteristics and the user policy. Multihoming protocols or their implementations provide various user interfaces to configure the filter rules. However, there is currently no method to describe user policy in terms of cost, bandwidth, delay and other network characteristics, and to compare this policy with the path characteristics. We thus propose in this paper a new framework for policy management for flow distribution, which offers a user interface to define policies and generates filter rules for each multihoming protocol. We first sort out the requirements for users in the multihomed environment. By reviewing some of the most important multihoming protocols and implementations, we show that they do not match all those requirements. We then propose a new policy management framework that fits those very requirements.