Towards Assuring Correct Coordination of Multilayer Recovery Using Integrated Ontologies

Configuring automated recovery in a multilayer virtualized network presents significant architectural issues. The rules that define the interworking strategy between recovery mechanisms must be translated into technology-specific provisioning commands sent to network devices. This provisioning data is typically fragmented across many computing and networking resources. There is also a set of possible device actions that can be performed by a resource, such as forwarding traffic to a protection route, discovering a route to send traffic, adjusting security characteristics of a link, and matching sender and receiver characteristics. Consequently, multiple information models, each of which is specific to a device type and technology layer must be understood, aligned and shared. As a result, an approach is needed to verify and validate that the resulting recovery operations from the input provisioning data achieve end-to-end service requirements.This paper presents an ontological approach to assure the correct coordination of recovery actions using an integrated knowledge model of multilayer recovery. With an ontological approach, an assurance case that proves correctness of provisioning and resulting network operations can be automated. Such an ontological model identifies the key domain elements and their relationships. Associated statements can then be retrieved from a knowledgebase so that the constraints associated with the network representation and service requirements can be tested.