Carlos Rodrigues, Solange Rito Lima, Luis M. Alvarez-Sabucedo*, Paulo Carvalho
Universidade do Minho
Departamento de Informática
P-4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Universidade de Vigo*
Dept. of Telematics
Vigo, Spain
Tel.: +351 253 604436
Fax.: +351 253 604471
E-mail: solange at di.uminho.pt; 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.