A Proposed Policy-Based Management Architecture for Wireless Clients Operating in a Heterogeneous Mobile Environment

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide a managed always best connected service to mobile entities over underlying heterogeneous wireless and mobile platforms while maintaining negotiated security and quality of service (QoS). This paper proposes a new model and its architecture which is based upon Policy-based Management but provides a new framework based on layered-approach for the centralised management of mobile clients. In particular, we propose and implement a new model of a policy-managed mobile client and its architecture to support seamless handoff across multiple access networks. The proposed mobile client supports multi-domain authentication, authorisation and security based on user profiles as well as the ability to negotiate management services over interconnected heterogeneous mobile platforms. We have also proposed a new handoff initiation algorithm to select an optimum time to handoff. This algorithm combines metrics in a novel way using standard deviations without resorting to other computationally intensive methods. Finally, this paper describes a proof-of-concept implementation based upon Microsoft Windows presenting a performance analysis to validate our architectural approach.