A role-based infrastructure for the management of dynamic communities

This paper defines an operational framework for specifying and establishing secure collaborations between autonomous entities that need to interact and depend on each other in order to accomplish their goals, in the context of mobile ad-hoc networks. We call such collaborations mission-oriented dynamic communities. We propose an abstract model for policy-based collaboration that relies on a set of task-oriented roles. Nodes are discovered dynamically and assigned to one or more roles, and then enforce the policies associated with these roles according to the description of the community. In this paper we focus on the roles that are needed to provide management and security functions for dynamic communities.