Policy enabling the services layer.

Emerging multimodal communications services are being designed with consideration for mobile high-speed access by mass market and enterprise subscribers. Multimodal services will stress the limits of current service management technologies employed by network operators. Policy management, with a rules engine at its core, provides the increased flexibility needed to support the complexity inherent in many of these services while providing a consistent subscriber experience. This paper explores the use of policy management at the network services application programming interface (API) layer to manage diverse communications services in networks that allow access to third-party value-added applications. We review available standards-based policy information models and a general architecture that supports the creation, storage, and execution of policies. We also describe the Vortex rules engine, developed by Bell Labs, which is being used in Lucent Technologies' MiLife TM line of products. (C) 2004 Lucent Technologies Inc.