New Role of Policy-Based Management in Home Area Networks - Concepts, Constraints and Challenges

The management of home area networks (HANs) is problematic. On the one hand there are increasing numbers of IP enabled devices that are connecting to the HAN (wired and wirelessly), some of which need to be managed, especially in terms of granting external access to certain services running on certain devices (e.g. home security, home monitoring, external media access). On the other hand, of any area of network management, the home network is the one where there is least likely to be a capable network manager physically there. So the Internet service providers (ISPs) have an interesting challenge: do they leave the management to the user and risk the degraded user experience that results, or do they offer to help manage the network for the home users, at potentially very high costs? This means that automated or autonomic (self-governed) network management approaches could potentially offer a solution. Policy-based network management (PBNM) is a promising network management paradigm that potentially makes administration tasks easier and lessens the complexity involved in the management process for the end user. In this article, we present the potential for PBNM in HAN. Significant concepts, constraints and challenges related to the PBNM implementation are discussed. The potential is that ISPs can use PBNM to improve end user experience in HANs without incurring excessive support costs.