8 Using Policy to Refine Routing

The Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker supports policy-based routing, allowing the user to select pre-defined policies or create their own policies and apply them to routes or the Registrar. In turn, these policies impact the behavior of the applicable routes when traffic matches user-defined conditions. The user configures new policies from the Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker's Policy icon (or uses pre-built policies) and applies them to routes and/or the Registrar. Routes support multiple policies.

Policy provides the Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker with a generic approach to configuring routing applications. Policy configuration assumes a desired behavior that has been identified by the user. The most common objectives include:

• Establish more specific routing decisions
• Apply additional services

The Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker abstracts policy behavior into three components including:

• Route
• Condition
• Action

The combination of route and condition define when the policy applies. The action refines the way in which the traffic uses the route. Note that possible actions may include not using the route.

This generic approach to route policy provides great flexibility in policy definition, but also imposes a level of complexity on the user, requiring them to:

• Identify the application they want to create.
• Determine how to identify the applicable traffic.
  • Use or create new routes specifically for the application.
  • Define the condition that causes the system to apply the policy to the route.
• Test traffic matching and application action.
• Ensure no overlapping configurations cause the system to use or not use the policy unexpectedly.

There are two components of a policy configuration:

• Conditions:
  • codec-condition—Tell the system to determine the presence of absence of specific codecs within an offer.
  • time-condition—Specify the day(s) of the week and time(s) of the day when the system uses the policy.
• Actions:
  • routing-action—Tells the system to modify how the route is applied.
  • redirect-action—Tells the system to direct traffic to the configured agent when the route and conditions match.
  • outbound-translation-action—Tells the system to perform the configured outbound translation when the route and conditions match.

Policies allow for both multiple conditions and actions. All conditions must be met for the condition to be true. Alternatively, the user can configure no conditions, meaning the policy's condition is always true. When a policy includes multiple actions, it performs all of the actions in the configured order.

The user may also need to create route(s) specific to the policy. Whether an existing or newly configured route, the user configures the route to use one or more policies to complete the application configuration.