6.2.3.4 Management Functionality

The management system is affected by management operations. This is especially the case with the enforcement of active metapolicies. They react on perturbations of the permissible state space. As a consequence, the managed objects and the management system must provide functionality which enables the enforcement of sufficient metapolicies.

In addition to the passive metapolicy support, functionality is needed for managing the components of NoCScontrol, the policy life cycle, and to control the supporting processes the management system uses. Currently, NoCScontrol only has a PDL parser as an supporting process. For this reason, there is hardly any management necessary. This will change, as soon as components for supporting the refinement, managing conflicts, etc. are added.

Metapolicy Service Mobile Agent must be able to correlate events, because it receives all the events sent by any method in the management system. Another possibility is to introduce a special event correlating component which lies between the event channel and the Metapolicy Service Mobile Agent. The problems resulting from event correlation will not be considered here.

The agent provides methods which allow changing the state of the management system. This can serve, in case of active policies, as a middleware between the Enforcement Objects and the methods provided by each component. This allows metapolicies and thus the Enforcement Objects to use special management actions whenever actions more complex than the existing primitive methods are necessary or desired. These specialised management actions are macros, accumulation of primitive method calls, or newly implemented methods. In the refinement of active (meta-)policies these management actions can be developed as the implementables from [Goh 97] described in subsection  and .

The NoCScontrol system with its flexible architecture can include various kinds of supporting objects and processes. The Metapolicy Service Mobile Agent provides support for managing these new objects or processes whenever necessary.

On the other hand the agent must keep track of all the states it is responsible for, which was described in the section before. Therefore, it must have implemented the functionality for this purpose, and for sending notifications which the Enforcement Objects are using for triggering active policies. Querying the state of NoCScontrol by an external component like a graphical user interface should be possible. This entails that the agent acts as a server and provides an API for for this task.

An interface which supports adding management operations would also be helpful, especially during the refinement process, but this addition is not discussed here.

The Metapolicy Service Mobile Agent acts as a central component responsible for the management of the NoCScontrol system.