Automated context dissemination for autonomic collaborative networks through semantic subscription filter generation

The current manual management of services and applications in today's telecommunication networks is becoming increasingly complicated. In the Future Internet, management is assumed to be automated by introducing an autonomic layer of distributed management elements. These distributed management elements need to collaborate with each other to ensure end-to-end quality guarantees. In this paper, we focus on the context dissemination between such collaborative management elements. Context dissemination is the exchange of all relevant management data and knowledge between the elements. Collaborating elements typically generate large amounts of context and it is important to filter this continuous stream. We propose a context dissemination approach that automates the context exchange between elements. The approach enables the automated generation of semantic subscription filters. Subscription filters allow an element to define where, how, and when context needs to be requested from other entities. Moreover, the proposed approach allows making the subscription filter generation dependent on the context. We present algorithms that intelligently filter the knowledge that is stored in the ontology. The results show that the generation of subscription filters can be done in the order of tens of milliseconds.