EXTENDED POLICY-BASED MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK TO PROVIDE ALWAYS BEST CONNECTED SERVICES IN HETEROGENEOUS MOBILE ENVIRON MENTS

摘要

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 is to provide an Always Best Connected (ABC) managed service over underlying heterogonous wireless and mobile platforms while maintaining negotiated security and Quality of Service in an open and nonproprietary environment. This paper proposes a new architecture which is based upon Policy-based Management (PBM) and provides a framework for the centralised management of networks based on business-level policies. However it extends the basic PBM ideas to provide a "layered approach" which facilitates the negotiation of management services over interconnected heterogonous mobile platforms thus achieving an always best connected scenario. This proposed layered-approach separates business policy specification from actual policy implementation by using common mapping translators to map the semantic and syntactic notation.