Ponder2 - Policy-Based Self Managed Cells

Abstract

Pervasive systems require minimal user intervention while constantly adapting their configuration and behaviour. For example, a personal area network of sensors and computational devices monitoring the health of a patient needs to be able to reconfigure itself in response to sensor changes (failures/removals or additions), changes in the activities or context of the patient as well as changes in the health of the patient.

This tutorial will present the Self-Managed Cell architecture developed at Imperial College in collaboration with the University of Glasgow with par-ticular emphasis on the use of policy-based techniques for implementing adaptation and reconfiguration in autonomous pervasive systems. Policies are rules governing choices in the behaviour of systems and are often en-countered as either event-condition-action rules or authorisation rules, al-though other types of policies such as negotiation, filtering and delegation can be defined. Policies can be used to define management and adaptation behaviours within autonomous cells of devices. In addition, they can govern interactions between and federation of the autonomous cells.

During this tutorial we will present aspects of the Ponder2 policy specification and implementation, structuring concepts for interactions between cells and integration of policy driven interpreters event and domain ser-vices. This tutorial will include a hands-on practical session based on the Ponder2 implementation realised at Imperial College. Ponder2 was recently designed as part of the TrustCoM project and has been used in several projects funded by the European Union and the EPSRC. More information about Ponder2 can be found at http://ponder2.net

This tutorial is aimed at those interested policy-based architectures for autonomous pervasive systems and will allow attendees to gain direct experience with the Ponder2 system. This tutorial is based on a tutorial previously given at the UKUBINET Workshop 2006. Attendees must have a laptop with Java JDK 5.0 installed (Windows, MAC or Linux platform).