A semantic approach to policy-based management: linking policies to ontologies

The possibility of dynamically managing Quality of Service (QoS) in heterogeneous networks represents a key element for telecom operators which aim at making their communication infrastructures able to support new emerging multimedia services. The large success of triple play services together with the ongoing migration of voice carriers towards the NGN (Next Generation Network) architecture imposes a new way of controlling and utilizing network resources in order to fulfill user's requirements. The use of network level policies to configure and manage QoS-based communication networks allows network operators to automatically adapt the managed systems to changing requirements of the new operational and business scenarios. In this paper we present an innovative approach to policy-based network management which ensures flexibility and effectiveness to all processes composing the service life cycle, from negotiation to delivery. In order to allow users and applications to modify their QoS requirements, thus triggering the SLA re-negotiation, at the same time optimizing the configuration of network elements we implemented a novel framework capable to automatically translate user's requirements into network policies. Such framework relies on the adoption of ontologies as means to describe heterogeneous realms such as those associated with the fruition and delivery of innovative services. Ontologies are used to represent user's needs and preferences, which feed the policy creation and enforcement process. Different real world scenarios are depicted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.