accounting purposes. An example of a useful mechanism for this purpose is a MIB or a relational database. However, this document does not specify any particular mechanism for this purpose and discussion of such mechanisms is out of the scope of this document.
4.4. Placement of Policy Elements in a Network
By allowing division of labor between an LPDP and a PDP, the policy control architecture allows staged deployment by enabling routers of varying degrees of sophistication, as far as policy control is concerned, to communicate with policy servers. Figure 4 depicts an example set of nodes belonging to three different administrative domains (AD) (Each AD could correspond to a different service
provider in this case). Nodes A, B and C belong to administrative domain AD-1, advised by PDP PS-1, while D and E belong to AD-2 and AD-3, respectively. E communicates with PDP PS-2. In general, it is expected that there will be at least one PDP per administrative domain.
Policy capable network nodes could range from very unsophisticated, such as E, which have no LPDP, and thus have to rely on an external PDP for every policy processing operation, to self-sufficient, such as D, which essentially encompasses both an LPDP and a PDP locally, at the router.
AD-1 AD-2 AD-3 ________________/\_______________ __/\___ __/\___ { } { } { } A B C D E +-------+ +-----+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+