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Abstract:Policies may be required in various scenarios during a multimedia flow set up, for example, during session setup, policy decisions must be provided to ensure that the session being requested lie within the bounds of the service profile established for the requesting host. Similarly, when a host requests resources to provide a certain QoS for a packet flow, policies may be provided to ensure that the required resources lie within the bounds of the resource profile established for the requesting host. The policy framework at the IETF [1] is focused on the resource reservation issues and thus provided a centralized approach for the policy decision function. This paper attempts to highlight the various scenarios in a multimedia flow establishment that lead to a distributed approach for policy decision-making. The paper also discusses the required characteristics of an interface between the policy decision functions residing in different administrative domains.