A dynamic governance framework for efficient orchestration of hetnet empowerment mechanisms

Now days autonomic network management systems are a significant part of Future Internet vision. These systems may be considered as Network Empowerment Mechanisms (NEMs) in an Heterogeneous, Multi-tier Network Environment. Their main purpose is to monitor network manageable entities, perform decision functions, and start possible healing actions. The NEMs deployment and interworking is proven to be a challenging task, as they increase network complexity in Future Internet paradigm. The decisions and the enforced actions of different NEMs may be conflicting for the underlying network environment thus increasing the complexity of the Network Management. The Unified Management Framework (UMF), solves the aforementioned problems by enabling the efficient orchestration of NEM entities. Following the UMF paradigm, in this work we provide the implementation of the Governance functionality based on an ontology implementation. Furthermore, building on the outcomes of the ontology, we implement the conflict detection and resolution functionality, aiming at handling conflicts in policies introduced by the network operator. The afore-described approach enables the dynamic introduction of newly deployed NEMs into the Governance lifecycle, through the use of OWL language, under specific time constraints.