Policy interactions and management of traffic engineering services based on ontologies

Trends such as converged networks and services require multiple and diverse networks and technologies to interoperate. Autonomic technologies are emerging as an important way to manage next generation services. This paper outlines an approach for lifecycle management of services and applications that require specific levels of quality of service. Our approach uses ontologies to create interoperability across different management domains using semantic reasoning, leveraging policy based management techniques to achieve autonomic behaviour. We define an architecture named PRIMO (Policy Relations and Interaction for Management using Ontologies), which provides a platform for our research. The main concern is to deliver to end users context-aware and QoS-dependant services while complying with business objectives of the service providers and network operators. We use ontologies to represent both the data and relationships between the data for all stakeholder views; this enables the interaction of various management views, especially those of the service provider and the network operator. We outline our approach for policy transformation and interaction between different management systems and show how context information, represented via ontologies, is a critical facilitator for this approach.