Ontology-Based Network Management in Seamless Roaming Architectures

The constant increase of the services available in data networks as well as the usage of multi-homing access networks by different service providers require a scalable and flexible interworking architecture for an efficient service delivery. Our approach consists in specifying an intermediatory architecture, RI roaming intermediatory. In this architecture, network operators manage a unique SLA (service level agreement) with the intermediate network, instead of a set of SLAs with various operators. Because of the complexity in managing several profiles, our architecture enables an ontology- based design of the operators' SLAs, users' database and configurations. A standard ontology language, W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL), is used to specify the different concepts of the roaming architecture. Also, a dedicated tool reusing standard ontology library (HP Jena API) was developed to load and create instances of existing users, SLAs and network configurations. The tool helps in quickly generating network configuration files derived from our ontology. This paper presents an ontology-based RI architecture as a solution for roaming over wireless local area network (WLAN) worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WIMAX) and 3GPP networks. To demonstrate our solution, a test-bed implementing different network technologies was setup.