The Design of a New Policy Model to Support Ontology-Driven Reasoning for Autonomic Networking

• Published in: 2007 Latin American Network Operations and Management Symposium pp. 114 - 125
• Main Authors: Strassner, J., Neuman de Souza, J., Raymer, D., Samudrala, S., Davy, S., Barrett, K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.09.2007
• Subjects: Adaptive control; Autonomic Networking; Computer architecture; Context modeling; Context-aware services; Data analysis; Data models; FOCALE Autonomic Architecture; Information analysis; Next Generation Services; Ontologies; Ontology-Based Management; Policy Management; Rats; Semantic Reasoning; Technology management
• ISBN: 1424411815; 9781424411818
• DOI: 10.1109/LANOMS.2007.4362466

The purpose of autonomic networking is to manage the business and technical complexity of networked components and systems. However, the lack of a common lingua franca makes it impossible to use vendor-specific network management data to ascertain the state of the network at any given time. Furthermore, the tools used to analyze management data, which include information and data models, ontologies, machine learning algorithms, and policy languages, are all different, and hence require different data in different formats. This paper describes a new version of the DEN-ng policy model, which is part of the FOCALE autonomic network architecture. This new policy model has been built using three guiding principles: (1) the policy model is rooted in information models, so that it can govern managed entities, (2) the model is expressly constructed to facilitate the generation of ontologies, so that reasoning about policies constructed from the model may be done, and (3) the model is expressly constructed so that a policy language can be developed from it.