Recent work in the IETF has led to the development of standards for a 
QoS-enabled Internet.  Through the efforts of the Integrated Services 
working group, data flows can describe their desired or required service 
to the network.  RSVP carries the service requests into the network, 
where the acceptance of these QoS requests results in better network 
service to some flows, possibly at the expense of service to traditional 
best-effort flows.

In an open and public Internet (as well as large intranets), maintaining
such service differentiation inherently depends on mechanisms capable of
enforcing (or reporting) operational policy constraints.  Towards this
end, RSVP message formats contain a place-holder for policy data0 
elements, which may contain information relevant to the network's
decision to grant a reservation request.

Certain network elements may require assistance in the processing of 
these policy-data elements and, therefore, may communicate with one or 
more policy servers, entities which specialize in the making of policy 
decisions.

The purpose of the IPC working group is to establish a scalable policy
control model for RSVP.  The working group will specify a protocol for
use among RSVP-capable network nodes and policy servers.  This work 
will also require documentation of any extensions to RSVP which may 
be necessary in support of this policy control.

Documents produced by the working group must fully address all the 
security aspects of this type of protocol.  In particular, theft and 
denial of service threats must be minimized.

In pursuit of these goals, the working group must expressly avoid
specifying policy behavior.  The judgment of specific policies is
similarly beyond the scope of the working group.