Distribute, store and retrieve management policies in wireless ad-hoc networks using the content delivery publish/subscribe paradigm

Abstract

Policy management is a management paradigm that has been extensively studied for the case of fixed networks but limited work can be found for migrating it to mobile environments. It enables dynamic adaptation of the network behavior to current conditions based on high-level business and operational objectives. Publish/subscribe has become an important architectural style for designing distributed systems and especially for mobile environments due to the loose coupling of the components involved namely the publishers and the subscribers. In this paper, we present a policy-based management system for wireless ad-hoc networks using the publish/subscribe paradigm for distributing policies to the managed nodes ensuring this way that all nodes will receive the related defined policies, in an asynchronous and loosely coupled manner, achieving the desired network-wide behavior. Moreover, we enhance the publish/ subscribe system with a novel request/response mechanism for tackling the problem of how newly joined nodes will retrieve previously introduced policies. Finally, we describe our initial design and implementation of the proposed mechanism, evaluate it through simulation and testbed experiments and give pointers to our future work. © 2009 IEEE.