An Adaptive Policy Approach To Video Quality Assurance

Video in all its forms is probably the most important service carried on networks today and few would argue that video quality assurance is one of the most daunting network management challenges. Quite often, video optimization strategies and their decisions are an integral part of either the video protocol (e.g. dynamic adaptation of rate and quality) or the distribution systems (e.g. multi-level caching architectures). A unified method of assuring video services is a formidable task, especially as the world prepares for the adoption of SG network concepts and the associated complexity. In parallel, policy has been proposed as an approach for managing domains in a flexible and adaptive manner. In this work, we describe our approach to use adaptive policy to externalize the goals and decision making of optimization strategies in the form of a network resource evaluation and path selection experiment aimed at video service quality assurance. In this paper, we present our approach, outline our initial implementation and discuss our preliminary results.