Distributed Policy Processing in Active-service Based Infrastructures

More and more applications in the Internet are requiring an intelligent service infrastructure to provide customized services. In this paper, we present an infrastructure, which can transparently and effectively provide customized active-services to end users and dynamically adapt to changing customized policies in large distributed heterogeneous environments. The infrastructure consists of two components: the policy agent and middleware box. Particularly, our technologies include: (1) Generic active-service based infrastructure, where the policy agent can integrate policies requested by applications, and middleware boxes can transparently execute services and (2) Distributed policy processing in the middleware box. We study two policy partitioning schemes to achieve conflict-free policies for distributed policy processing and guarantee the correctness of the policy execution. We conduct extensive performance evaluations on different schemes proposed. Our experimental results demonstrate that our policy partitioning schemes can effectively generate partition-capable and conflict-free policy sets. The evaluation results also show that distributed policy processing can achieve over 70% increase in performance/price ratio with proper assignment of the policy distribution degree compared to a purely centralized approach. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd