Policy-Based Hybrid Approach to Service Provisioning in Federations of Personal Networks

A personal network (PN) is a network of geographically distributed personal devices, which creates a distributed environment of a user and provides access to personal resources and services regardless the location of the user. A federation of personal networks (Fednet) is a peer-to-peer cooperation of PNs of different users to share personal resources and services. Until now little research has been conducted on the service provisioning in Fednets. Based on the current status of the research on Fednets, the service provisioning can be done directly at the personal device (network overlay approach), or at a specific entry point of a PN, called a service proxy (service proxy approach). While the network overlay approach provides quick service access and provisioning, the service proxy approach provides a more elegant solution for service provisioning by preventing direct access of other PNs to the PN's services and by enabling the control over the access to personal services at a single point of a PN. In this paper, to leverage the advantages of both approaches, we propose a hybrid approach to service provisioning in Fednets, which combines both approaches to provide an optimal and flexible solution for service provisioning in Fednets.