Policy-based model-driven engineering of pervasive services and the associated OSS

This paper presents our work towards a fully functioning platform for pervasive service engineering in an operational support services (OSS) context for an ICT service provider. The focus of the paper lies in a proof-of-concept for a novel means to develop and execute pervasive services, with simplicity and maintainability as prime drivers. The essence of this approach is the novel integration of the policy-based management (PBM) techniques and the model-driven architecture (MDA) techniques for specifying pervasive services and their behaviour, together with auto-generation of middleware implementation and policy enablement. The presence of policies provides pervasive services with the high flexibility and adaptability needed for dealing with changing environments and resource availabilities, while the introduction of MDA for defining pervasive service information models fundamentally solves the information modelling puzzle of current policy-based approaches. Additionally, MDA's middleware-neutral feature benefits the smooth evolution of pervasive services as a piece of software artefact in the face of heterogeneous devices and platforms. A preliminary case study has demonstrated the practical feasibility and benefits of this approach. The case study revolves around an ICT service called TEANU - transparent enterprise access for nomadic user. The service provides a means for nomadic users to maintain a secure access to their enterprise network in the presence of multiple access network providers with different service level guarantees.