PHD 01/09
Extended Policy-Based Management Framework to Provide Always Best Connected Services in Heterogeneous Mobile Environments
Mayank Keshariya (Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Ray Hunt and Dr. Richard Pascoe)
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
University of Canterbury
Abstract
The growth in the popularity of Internet services,
increasing demands of mobile users together with a wide range of access
technologies and mobile-networked devices, introduces the notion of
integration and inter-working of heterogeneous access networks.
Sometimes referred to as 4th generation (4G) networks, the overall
objective of this research is to provide a managed Always Best Connected
(ABC) service over underlying heterogeneous wireless and mobile
platforms while maintaining negotiated security and Quality of Service
in a scalable and modular environment. This research proposes a new
model and its architecture for policy-based management (PBM) to provide
a framework for the centralised management of networks based on
business-level policies. This work extends existing IETF Policy-based
Network Management (PBNM) model by introducing a new layered-approach
which facilitates the negotiation of management services over
interconnected heterogeneous mobile platforms, thus achieving an ABC
scenario. The proposed layered-approach provides flexibility to the
organisations so that they can choose favourable semantic and syntactic
approaches and facilitates the separation of management policies from
their implementation in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. The
extended Policy Information Model and a new policy conflict detection
technique are also introduced. Further, we have proposed and implemented
a new model of a policy-managed mobile client and its architecture to
support seamless handoff across multiple access networks. The proposed
mobile client supports multi-domain authentication and security along
with downloadable user profiles. We have also proposed and implemented a
network selection algorithm and introduced a new /Infrastructure
/parameter, which assists in selecting an optimum time and the best
available access network to handoff. We present performance analysis to
validate our architectural approach.
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