Automatic Policy Refinement Using OWL-S and Semantic Infrastructure Information

Network management requires a lot of manual work. Due to ongoing growth of the Internet, more self-management is needed in order to deal with the growing complexity. Autonomic communication systems address this issue. Often, they make use of policy-based management systems. Policy-based management is an approach to simplify management by the use of rules. Policy refinement, i.e. breaking down high-level policies to technical configurations is still a task that needs a significant amount of manual work. We propose SEMPR, an architecture that uses Web services and automatic Web services composition as a complementary technique to policy refinement in order to automate policy-based management. Semantic Web services, described in OWL-S, as well as policies make use of our simple network ontology NINO. We show the application of our work in a Home Area Network (HAN) environment and give an outlook on future research challenges.