Policy-Based Service Provisioning for Mobile Users

There is an increasing number of independent domains in the Internet managed by different ISPs. These ISPs are constrained in their domains by limited resources, a growing number of users, and heterogenous services they offer. In order to manage this, each ISP differentiates between its users by establishing a SLA (Service Level Agreement). The SLA defines the resources that the provider agrees to offer to each user. However, the provisioning of services to mobile users is not an easy task. There is no SLA between the mobile user and the visited domain. Thus, there is a necessity to automatically manage mobile users and provide them with resources for services they request, within the limits of the available resources. We propose here a new architecture capable of automating the service provisioning to mobile users. This architecture uses two paradigms: policies and mobile agents. Policies are used to set the business behavior of the domain, to control it, to manage how the services will be provided and how the resources have to be configured. Mobile Agents are used to gather information about the services and resources and negotiate a service on behalf of the mobile user or the ISP.