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Ontological Semantics for Distributing Contextual Knowledge in Highly Distributed Autonomic Systems

  • Special Issue Autonomic
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Much recent research has focused on applying Autonomic Computing principles to achieve constrained self-management in adaptive systems, through self-monitoring and analysis, strategy planning, and self adjustment. However, in a highly distributed system, just monitoring current operation and context is a complex and largely unsolved problem domain. This difficulty is particularly evident in the areas of network management, pervasive computing, and autonomic communications. This paper presents a model for the filtered dissemination of semantically enriched knowledge over a large loosely coupled network of distributed heterogeneous autonomic agents, removing the need to bind explicitly to all of the potential sources of that knowledge. This paper presents an implementation of such a knowledge delivery service, which enables the efficient routing of distributed heterogeneous knowledge to, and only to, nodes that have expressed an interest in that knowledge. This gathered knowledge can then be used as the operational or context information needed to analyze to the system's behavior as part of an autonomic control loop. As a case study this paper focuses on contextual knowledge distribution for autonomic network management. A comparative evaluation of the performance of the knowledge delivery service is also provided.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was partially funded by the EU under the ACCA project, by Science Foundation, Ireland under the CTVR project, and by the Irish Higher Education Authority under the M-Zones program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Telecommunications Value-chain Research and Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin, 2, Ireland

    John Keeney, David Lewis & Declan O’Sullivan

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  1. John Keeney
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  2. David Lewis
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  3. Declan O’Sullivan
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Correspondence to John Keeney.

Additional information

John Keeney holds a BAI degree in Computer Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin. His primary interests are in controlling autonomic adaptable systems, particularly when those systems are distributed.

David Lewis graduated in Electronics Engineering from the University of Southampton and gained his PhD in Computer Science from University College London. His areas of interest include integrated network and service management, distributed system engineering, adaptive and autonomic systems, semantic services and pervasive computing.

Declan O’Sullivan was awarded his primary degree, MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin. He has a particular interest in the issues of semantic interoperability and heterogeneous information querying within a range of areas, primarily network and service management, autonomic management, and pervasive computing.

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Keeney, J., Lewis, D. & O’Sullivan, D. Ontological Semantics for Distributing Contextual Knowledge in Highly Distributed Autonomic Systems. J Netw Syst Manage 15, 75–86 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-006-9054-5

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