Introducing a cross federation identity solution for converged network environments

The Future Internet architecture, based on the integration of existing networks and services, and the addition of many new devices like sensors, face a series of important technical challenges, one of them being the management of diverse user identities. The diversity and plethora of the services and procedures affected by the unassociated existing user identities stress the necessity for a holistic solution to deal with the different aspects of the identity management problem. Existing efforts propose limited identity solutions that can only be applied within well defined boundaries and cannot extend their functionality to support converged network environments and service operations across different administrative domains. This paper presents a Dynamic Identity Mapping Association N'Discovery System (DIMANDS) as a holistic identity solution for large scale heterogeneous network environments. This solution offers cross federation identity services and is based on a uni versal discovery mechanism which spans across different networks, layers and federations. It is also empowered with a unified trust framework which can collect and process diverse trust information to provide trust decisions on a widely accepted format.