Gavin A. Campbell

Goals and Policies for Sensor Network Management

This paper describes a goal-directed, policy-based approach to managing sensor networks in the context of a wind farm. It describes the use of policies to enable end-users to detect and handle events, and discusses how high-level goals can be used to configure both the sensor network and the monitored system. Such use of goals and policies for sensor network management is a new area of research. While this paper discusses the approach in relation to the wind farm domain, the frameworks described are applicable to sensor network management in general.

Managing Home Care Networks

Home care networks are a new development for automated support of care at home. To address the challenges of home care, the paper describes a component-based architecture developed by the MATCH project (Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home). Two key components are discussed for managing home care networks. A Service Registry supports generic and extensible registration of services, components, resources and devices in the home. The registry uses ontologies for semantically-based description and discovery. A Policy System automates support of how a home network should deliver care. The views of stakeholders in home care are represented as goals and policies. These are defined in a user-friendly manner and are applied at run-time. Conflicts among goals and policies are automatically detected and resolved.

Goals and Conflicts in Telephony

Goals are abstract, user-oriented objectives for how a system should behave. To be made operational, they are refined into lower-level policies that are executed dynamically. It is explained how previous work on policy-based management has been enhanced with a separate goal system that allows goals to be specified, analysed, refined, and achieved. It is shown how conflicts can arise at several levels among goals, and how these conflicts are detected and handled. Although the approach is general, it is illustrated through an application to Internet telephony.