Patent 9252972 was granted and assigned to Juniper Networks on February, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A network device includes an internal policy engine that makes local policy decisions for packet flows and controls policies applied by service modules and forwarding components of the network device. The policy engine interacts with an external policy server to receive policies using software defined networking (SDN) protocol as if the data plane of the network device were directly exposed to the external policy server by the SDN protocol.