NGSON Service Composition Ontology

Abstract

The paradigm of Next Generation Service Overlay Networks (NGSON) strives to provide a unified and standardized framework of IP-based service overlay networks, creating an ecosystem of context-aware, dynamically adaptive, and self-organizing networking capabilities, including advanced routing and forwarding schemes. Service composition, i.e. the facility to combine certain atomic services into an aggregated service is considered a vital part of NGSON. As a future directed, next generation oriented paradigm NGSON must enable an intelligent, automated service composition platform. In order to also meet the objectives of being context-aware, dynamically adaptive, and self-organizing this platform needs to know and understand the semantics of its underlying functional entities. Furthermore, to be accepted by users, enterprises and service developers existing, proven, but likewise extendable standards need to be utilized as much as possible.

The W3C consortium has released OWL2 for building ontologies that serve to provide machine-understandable semantics. In order to be feasible for NGSON a service composition ontology also needs to include concepts from deontic logic, i.e. needs to be able to differentiate between omissible and permissible classes, or -in finer granularity- prohibited, obligatory and optional components when composing a service from atoms.

This paper aims to underline the need for an OWL2 ontology, make suggestions on its structure and required interfaces to other network entities as e.g. Software Defined Networks and Network Virtualization Functions.