Managing collaboration and competition of multiple WAN services in a residential network

Open service platforms like the OSGi-platform offer a standard, scalable way for service providers to remotely deploy their services inside many residential networks. However, the lack of control by WAN service providers on the home environment together with too complex end-user policy configuration hinder widespread e-deployment of services into the home. Several architectures have been presented for next generation home networks, coping with the deployment, discovery and run-time control of residential services in order to enforce service levels. However, to evolve towards true collaboration scenarios where a service from one service provider can interact with a service from another service provider without configuration inconvenience, or where a service from one service provider can co-exist with an identical service from another provider on the same device, proper security and policy configuration needs to be addressed. This paper contributes therefore to the already presented architectures by discussing secure remote policy configuration in a multi service provider environment. A security framework is proposed based on the OSGi specification that limits not-trusted service providers in their control on other services. The strength of the framework lies in its generic XACML-compliant policy configuration module and its compatibility with existing services. This makes the framework easy to adopt for remote configuration providers, which allows service providers to delegate configuration support to a service aggregation provider.