Resources discovery and management using policies in smart spaces

This paper presents a new hierarchical Policy Based Management (PBM) architecture that facilitates the description and automatic discovery of services and devices in Smart Space environments and the specification of high-level policies that control access to these resources in coexisting Managed Zones (M-Zones). The approach is performed in two phases. The first one consists of defining a generic information model of all resources that can be managed in such a space and a specification of a set of high-level policies to express the access control policy of each M-Zone. Both models are specified using the DMTF CIM. (For the next iteration, it is planned to use the DEN-ng model, extended with new specific objects). The second phase is more dynamic and uses a novel discovery protocol based on COPS to identify the various components that are present in a particular environment. This protocol is named COPS-SD (COPS extensions for Service Discovery usage)