Nomadic Computing Systems on the Internet | Infrastructure and Management Requirements

Nomadic computing using powerful portable systems has entered the mainstream of computing due to the recent progress in terms of performance and usability of the necessary hardware. However, most of these systems are still being used stand-alone with almost no provision for management support in the home as well as in the visited domain. This complicates connguration by forcing manual intervention, i.e. for networking and service location, or keeps providers of visited domains from ooering their services to nomadic systems due to security and accounting considerations. This paper will rst give an overview of the ongoing IETF standardisation eeorts supporting nomadic and mobile computing and will present some the protocols and implied architectures of the relevant IETF Working Groups. The selection is based on the requirements of the full integration of nomadic computing systems into the visited domain and especially the tasks of connguration and security management. Special attention will be paid to the work on RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service), Mobile-IP, and service discovery and connguration. Our research work focuses on the management requirements of these protocols and architectures. The development status of management standards either within the working groups or by ourselves will be stated, especially regarding providers' needs. Since management for nomadic computing implies exchange of information across management domains this aspect is taken into account too, paying attention to requirements such as timeliness, reliability, distribution, and security of the relevant information. An outlook on some of the work to be done nalises the paper.