Alvin Tan

Contextware Research Challenges in Ambient Networks

Network-centric context information is used to make networks more receptive to the users’ needs by personalizing the communication process and making it more sensitive to changes that may occur in the surroundings. As such, it is a natural step that context awareness should be suitably incorporated within traditional networks in order to create an ‘ambient network’. This approach is aimed at enabling the co-operation of heterogeneous networks on demand, transparently to the potential users, and without the need for preconfiguration or offline negotiation between network operators. This paper discusses the approach taken by authors to incorporate context-awareness into ambient networking concepts. It discusses how network-related context information should be utilized in ambient networks for the end user to fully experience the pervasiveness of a network and the research challenges arising from this utilization. The paper also evaluates the benefits of employing context information and contextware concepts in ambient networks.

A Policy-Based Management Architecture for Flexible Service Deployment in Active Networks

This paper describes a dynamic, scalable and extensible policy-based network management (PBNM) system that is fully integrated with a service provisioning architectures for active networks. The key result is network customisation according to the needs of the different service providers and its end users. Our component-based service provisioning architecture enables us to render service- and user-specific requirements, across single/multiple administrative domains, at deployment time and to dynamically map service components onto the network using the corresponding management policies. The architecture presented in this paper describes the approach undertaken by the IST-FAIN research project as well as the main issues that we encounter in developing and integrating the PBNM with the service provisioning mechanism.

Context-Aware GRID Services: Issues and Approaches

While Grid services introduce efficiency in addressing the changing and often large resource demands of Grid applications, making the system context-aware takes the approach a step further by incorporating the important aspects of customisation and personalisation into Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) services. This is achieved by extending the concept of virtual organisations (VO) to Grid context, which link context information to users, policies and resources. Context is defined as any information that can be used to characterise the situation of an entity. When this information is modelled and properly managed, the OGSA services can become context-aware and context-aware services can be offered by the Grid.

The FAIN Management Framework: a management approach for active network environments

The FAIN Management Framework of active and programmable networks is an innovative distributed policy based management framework that copes with the specific management requirements of active networks, dynamically adapting to heterogeneous network technologies and functionalities. Also, it supports a flexible delegation approach with co-existence of different management strategies allowing actors to best customise the management architecture to their business needs. This results in reduction of redundant traffic and information processing, and dynamic fine-grained management tailoring. The paper focuses on how policy-based management is applicable to the active network and how these technologies can merge in an evolutionary management framework. The concepts presented here have been developed within the framework of the FAIN project.