The Internet of Things lacks standardized mechanisms for discovering new and changing knowledge. While vendors may have the ability to build applications for their own devices, this typically does not enable open communication and sharing of data and knowledge. This document describes an architecture that combines information and data models with ontologies to provide an extensible semantic interoperability layer. This ensures that the meaning of terms and objects in one device or system are not lost or altered when they are exchanged and used by other devices or systems.

This draft defines the I2NSF Capability APIs for implementing User- Group-based Security Policies using the Event-Condition-Action Policy Rule paradigm.

The current manual management of services and applications in today's telecommunication networks is becoming increasingly complicated. In the Future Internet, management is assumed to be automated by introducing an autonomic layer of distributed management elements. These distributed management elements need to collaborate with each other to ensure end-to-end quality guarantees. In this paper, we focus on the context dissemination between such collaborative management elements. Context dissemination is the exchange of all relevant management data and knowledge between the elements. Collaborating elements typically generate large amounts of context and it is important to filter this continuous stream. We propose a context dissemination approach that automates the context exchange between elements. The approach enables the automated generation of semantic subscription filters. Subscription filters allow an element to define where, how, and when context needs to be requested from other entities. Moreover, the proposed approach allows making the subscription filter generation dependent on the context. We present algorithms that intelligently filter the knowledge that is stored in the ontology. The results show that the generation of subscription filters can be done in the order of tens of milliseconds.

The majority of existing recommender systems use one or more statistical techniques to recommend content. While such techniques can be very effective, they have a number of restrictions, such as their inability to recommend items based on meaning or relationships between different characteristics of each item. This paper describes the design of a hybrid recommender system that uses a combination of statistical and semantic mechanisms to recommend content. In addition, semantics are used to fine-tune the nature of the recommendation on a context-specific basis. Future extensions based on social networks are also described.

This paper presents tool support for testing mobility of mobile devices in heterogeneous mobile networks. As mobile devices are growing and networks are becoming heterogeneous, their mobility management in heterogeneous mobile networks has become important. Nonetheless, previous network simulators have focused on handover protocols at layer 2 or layer 3, but have not focused on handover decisions at layer 7. This tool suite allows the user to create multiple types of mobile networks, mobile nodes, and network servers for testing mobility of mobile devices. Moreover, it also allows the user to create simulation scenarios and generates testing results based on users' demands. This paper presents the requirements, design, and implementation of the tool suite. We show the feasibility of our tool using a case study of context-aware handover decision management.

The previous chapter has established the motivation for building the FOCALE autonomic architecture. This chapter traces the evolution of FOCALE by first explaining why its knowledge representation is based on the integration of knowledge extracted from information and data models with knowledge extracted from ontologies. It then explains the development of the novel FOCALE control loops, which use its unique knowledge representation to support an advanced cognition model that is based on cognitive psychology. This cognition model provides FOCALE with a unique feature that other autonomic architectures do not have: the ability to emulate how human beings make decisions.

The policy continuum is a fundamental component of any policy-based management implementation for autonomic networking, but as of yet has no formal operational semantics. We propose a policy continuum model and accompanying policy authoring process that demonstrates the key properties that set a continuum apart from a non-hierarchical policy model. As part of the policy authoring process we present a policy conflict analysis algorithm that leverages the information model, making it applicable to arbitrary applications and continuum levels. The approach for policy conflict analysis entails analysing a candidate policy (either newly created or modified) on a pair-wise basis with already deployed policies and potential conflicts between the policies are fed back to the policy author. Central to the approach is a two-phase algorithm which firstly determines the relationships between the pair of policies and secondly applies an application specific conflict pattern to determine if the policies should be flagged as potentially conflicting. In this paper we present the formal policy continuum and two-phase conflict analysis algorithm as part of the policy authoring process, we describe an implementation where we demonstrate the detection of potential conflicts within a policy continuum.

Network devices will always be heterogeneous, both in the functionality they provide and in the way they represent and use management data. This adversely affects interoperability and makes management of networks and networked applications more difficult. This chapter describes the motivation and design of the FOCALE autonomic networking architecture. FOCALE is based on the following core principles: (1) use a combination of information and data models to establish a common “lingua franca” to map vendor- and technology-specific functionality to a common platform-, technology-, and language independent form, (2) augment this with ontologies to attach formally defined meaning and semantics to the facts defined in the models, (3) use the combination of models and ontologies to discover and program semantically similar functionality for heterogeneous devices independent of the data and language used by each device, (4) use context-aware policy management to govern the resources and services provided, (5) use multiple-control loops to provide adaptive control to changing context, and (6) use multiple machine learning algorithms to enable FOCALE to be aware of both itself and of its environment in order to reduce the amount of work required by human administrators. This chapter first motivates the need for autonomic systems and explains why a well-known but simple example of an autonomic control loop is not sufficient for network management purposes. It uses these deficiencies as motivation to explain the rationale behind the original FOCALE autonomic architecture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how knowledge is represented in FOCALE.

The Internet is a very successful modern technology and is considered to be one of the most important means of communication. Despite that success, fundamental architectural and business limitations exist in the Internet's design. Among these limitations, we focus on a specific issue, the lack of manageability, in this paper. Although it is generally understood that management is a significant and important part of network and service design, it has not been considered as an integral part in their design phase. We address this problem with our future Internet management architecture called highly manageable network and service architecture for new generation (HiMang), which is a novel architecture that aims at integrating management capabilities into network and service design. HiMang is highly manageable in the sense that it is autonomous, scalable, robust, and evolutionary while reducing the complexity of network management. Unlike any other management framework, HiMang provides management support for the revolutionary networks of the future while maintaining backward compatibility for existing networks.

Recently, the autonomic communication networks paradigm has been introduced as a solution to the increasing management complexity of communication networks in the Future Internet. In order to encompass the large-scale nature of these networks, a general consensus has been reached that the supporting autonomic management architectures should be distributed for scalability reasons. However, several open issues related to the distribution of autonomic components remain to be solved. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to structuring distributed autonomic components in large-scale communication networks. The approach is generic and can be applied to many existing autonomic architectures and control loops. The autonomic components are structured in a hierarchy, which simplifies the interaction between components, and allows them to manage resources and govern child components in a more scalable manner. In addition to giving a detailed description of the hierarchical architecture, the advantages of the proposed approach are validated through analytical evaluation results.

The demand for new and innovative services, and especially for personalized services, continues to increase. In such systems, different services may compete for the same set of shared resources. Hence, the mix of services and resources that each has often results in conflicting demands on shared resources, and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Autonomic systems that provide virtual resources and services can provide important management benefits to ensure that the needs of different services can simultaneously be met. This paper describes the requirements for provisioning and managing virtual resources and services, and extends the DEN-ng information model to architect such systems.

To support rapidly evolving business models, communications network management systems are increasingly being federated to provide more flexible, end-to-end service management. In the future, such federation will need to be achieved dynamically, thus management systems will need to incorporate capabilities supporting negotiation of federations and management of their lifecycle. We discuss how federations can be governed via negotiated federation-level policies, that should be consistent with the relevant local policies of individual federation members. We describe a policy authoring process, outlining the steps to be taken when local or federation-level policies are created, modified or withdrawn. As this process depends on the presence of a rich system model for policy analysis we describe an extension to DEN-ng that models governance of federated domains. Finally, we outline a case study relating to inter-organisation XMPP federations to illustrate the policy authoring process.

In the last decade, networks have evolved from simple data packet forwarding to platforms that support complex multimedia services, such as network-based personal video recording and broadcast TV. Each of these services has significant quality demands: they are very sensitive to packet loss and jitter, and require a substantial amount of bandwidth. As the quality perceived by the end user gives the most accurate view on the streamed service quality, operators are increasing their focus on this type of metric, commonly described as Quality of Experience. This paper presents the design of a Quality of Experience information model that defines important metrics for measuring service quality. Based on these metrics, we define a novel control loop that represents the relationships among Quality of Experience, the Customer, and network services.

In the Future Internet, free exchange of information between enterprise applications and networking systems promotes the personalization of services and enables many different types of end-user applications and management operations optimizing the network performance. As result of this free information exchange, we need to facilitate the federation of information between these applications, harmonizing the differences between operation, management data and information models in heterogeneous networks, and application management systems. This paper concentrates on identifying the research challenges that we have to address in the areas of software engineering and network management supporting federation. In particular, we describe research challenges for federated management systems highlighting the flexibility these systems can offer in the Future Internet communications, when they are able to support value-added federated end-to-end services. As part of our approach, semantic techniques are cited to represent networking information governing technology and/or network protocols offering a wide diversity of end-to-end services as a result of this transparent information sharing process.

One of the most fundamental management aspects of the Future Internet is the representation of management and operational data. The vast majority of languages and data structures used by network device manufacturers, such as SNMP-based designs and Command Line Interfaces, are data-oriented and are not conducive to representing semantic knowledge. Furthermore, such languages have no ability to represent business concepts, such as a Service Level Agreement, or higher-level concepts, such as the ability to maximize revenue for all users. To solve this problem, we draw inspiration from semantic routing, which traditionally has been used to connect users and applications with desired content and services based on intent, meaning, and other semantic qualities. We define a type of semantic routing that can be used for both semantic querying and network management tasks, and use it to create a semantic overlay network that enables routing to be done on the meaning of the packets. This can be used to provide valuable insight into how best to implement personalized and context-aware services, as well as choose between multiple reconfiguration alternatives for a given scenario.