Policy-based service provisioning and users management using mobile agents

Many papers have addressed policy-based management of networks focusing on security and QoS. However, users' mobility remains a difficult aspect of this approach. There is considerable difficulty in supporting the provision of QoS and security services in a common architecture to satisfy the many requirements that a user can ask for. The need for automated management shows the necessity to use languages to define policies. These languages are still not sufficient since they don't provide tools to map high-level policies into device-dependant ones or they offer only the possibility to cover either management policies or security ones. We present in this paper a policy-based management architecture for the provisioning of services to users using mobile agents. We based this architecture on the notion of a domain. Each domain represents an administrative authority with its own behavior, polices, and users. The agents are under the control of a set of policies that define what to do when a mobile foreign user connects into the domain. When a mobile user is visiting a domain and asks for a service, this domain supplies him with a negotiated QoS and security. The negotiation includes the mobile user and the foreign domain, or the home, the foreign and eventually neighboring ones. The user's profile is a starting point of the negotiation. This agent-based architecture supports mapping polices from high level to network ones. To do so, different agent collects information concerning the devices' capabilities and the technologies supported.