Carlos Rodrigues, Solange Rito Lima, Luis M. Álvarez-Sabucedo*, Paulo Carvalho
Tel.: +351 253 604436
Fax.: +351 253 604471
E-mail: pmc at di.uminho.pt
The use of the Internet as a global communication infrastructure to
support a wide range of multiconstrained applications and services
poses new challenges to ISPs regarding network services management and
auditing. In this context, the semantic characterization and modeling
of services provided to users assumes an essential role in fostering
service management automation. Moreover, the semantic and formal
description of services allows enhancing the negotiation and
interoperability between clients and service providers. This paper
reports the first steps toward the definition of an ontology for
multiservice networks that eases and systemizes decision support of QoS
deployment in ISP infrastructures, according to service levels
established in SLAs. Other management tasks such as dynamic service
negotiation and configuration, service monitoring and auditing may also
benefit from the present ontology proposal.