OntoNet: Scalable knowledge-based networking

Recent years have seen a proliferation of work on the Semantic Web, an initiative to enable intelligent agents to reason about and utilize World Wide Web content and services. Concurrently, the networking community has developed a concept of the knowledge plane, using artificial intelligence to reason about and manage network behavior. These two efforts have progressed independently despite potential synergies. This paper presents early work on OntoNet, a knowledge-based middleware which aims to integrate those visions and provide flexible, scalable knowledge-based networking with ontologies. We focus on supporting multicast messaging in mobile ad-hoc networks using description logic advertisements and requests in a subset of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We explore a novel hybrid tree- mesh protocol which enables efficient and robust propagation of potentially verbose queries and descriptions. We demonstrate the potential viability of this protocol via simulations in the newly developed NS-3 simulator.