The NOVI information models

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Abstract

The NOVI Information Model (IM) and the corresponding data models are the glue between the software components in the NOVI Service Layer. The IM enables the communication among the various components of the NOVI Architecture and supports the various functionalities it offers. The NOVI IM consists of three main ontologies: resource, monitoring and policy ontology that have evolved over time to accommodate the emerging requirements of the NOVI architecture. This article presents the NOVI IM and its ontologies, together with an overview of how the NOVI software prototypes have benefited from using the IM.

Introduction

The NOVI project has defined and implemented an architecture that supports federation of e-Infrastructures towards a holistic Future Internet approach. Software components within the NOVI Service Layer allow users to have a unique interface to access and use resources in different testbeds. Access to the testbeds, authorization policies, monitoring information and selection of resources are integrated among platforms and implemented in the NOVI layer.

The definition of a common Information Model (IM) has from the start of the project been the essential element to achieve the federation goals. Various requirements have guided its development:

  • Support of virtualization concepts to cater for virtualized resources;

  • Semantics and context-awareness to support context-aware resource selection;

  • Vendor independency as the different virtualized infrastructures have hardware and software from different vendors;

  • Support of monitoring and measurement concepts, such that monitored entities along with the measurement units are uniformly described;

  • Support of management policies.

The model that we have created and present here satisfies the above requirements and consists of the following features:

  • Virtualization is modeled explicitly for both computing and networking devices;

  • OWL is the language chosen to define the model;

  • No vendor specific assumptions are made in the model;

  • The model is modular and composed of three main ontologies: a resource ontology, the monitoring ontology and the policy ontology.

This document presents the NOVI IM ontologies, with a focus on the classes and properties that have been defined. We start the article with an overview of related work in Section  2. We then provide an overview of how the information model is used in NOVI by illustrating the lifecycle of a user-request in Section  3. In Section  4 we present the complete model, with its classes and properties. Section  5 provides a global overview of the implementation in the NOVI Service Layer and how the information model was incorporated. Section  6 concludes the article by highlighting the potential use of the model after the completion of the project.

Section snippets

Related work

Numerous efforts have been done in the past few years to develop new information models that are capable to describe network resources, tools and management policies. However, each of them focuses on specific problems and is not general enough to express all the aspects of a such complex system as NOVI, which consists of virtualized and physical resources, substrate and slice monitoring, and network policies as well.

The Common Information Model  [1] is produced by the Distributed Management

Example use case explaining the NOVI architecture

The high level overview of the NOVI Data, Control and Management architecture, reported in  [8], is presented in Fig. 1. In this section we will go through the lifecycle of a request and show how the different services of NOVI, contribute to a request, so as to explain the NOVI architecture. In this section we lay out everything in order to provide a better idea of what happens and exactly how intertwined the NOVI IM is with the working of all services. In NOVI we categorize requests into three

NOVI information model

This section describes the NOVI Information Model. The section provides a comprehensive documentation of the complete information model, divided in its three components, as shown in Fig. 2. First we provide a general overview, In Section  4.1 we describe the Resource Ontology, in Section  4.2 we describe the Monitoring Ontology and its various parts, followed by a description of the Policy Ontology in Section  4.3.

Implementation

This section describes how the NOVI Information model was implemented and used in the NOVI Services. A first important step for using an information model is to pour it into a data model. Then we describe how the different services have benefited from the NOVI IM. For a more detailed discussion of the implementation of the NOVI IM, see  [15].

Conclusion

The NOVI information model defines the semantics to describe NOVI resources and services, express requests, supports the NOVI policy based management system and unifies active and passive monitoring information of the testbeds. It enables the interoperation among the NOVI software components.

The development of the NOVI IM has closely followed the evolution of the NOVI architecture as a whole. Since the delivery of the first draft of the model several changes have been introduced to better match

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the European Commission, 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, Capacities, Grant No. 257867—NOVI. Furthermore, this publication was supported by the Dutch national program COMMIT and the GigaPort 2013 Research on Networks project. The authors thank the partial support of the EU FP7 OpenLab project—Grant No. 287581—, the EIT ICTLabs FITTING project, the MAKOG Foundation and the EITKIC 12-1-2012-0001 project supported by the

Jeroen van der Ham received his M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University in 2002, his M.Sc. in System and Network Engineering in 2004, and his Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Amsterdam on the topic of “Semantic descriptions of complex computer networks”. He is currently working as a researcher at the System and Network Engineering research group at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests are in semantic descriptions of multi-layer and multi-domain networks and

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Jeroen van der Ham received his M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University in 2002, his M.Sc. in System and Network Engineering in 2004, and his Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Amsterdam on the topic of “Semantic descriptions of complex computer networks”. He is currently working as a researcher at the System and Network Engineering research group at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests are in semantic descriptions of multi-layer and multi-domain networks and (virtualized) resources, as well as associated algorithms and architectures. He is the editor of the NML Schema document and currently involved in various EU-funded projects, including NOVI.

József Stéger received the Ph.D. degree in physics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, in 2010. Currently he is teaching assistant at the Department of Physics of Complex Systems and since 1999 he is a permanent member of Communication Networks Laboratory. His research interests include Internet measurement techniques based on active probing and network modeling, especially delay tomography and IP geolocation. He was one of the founders of the ETOMIC measurement infrastructure. Since 2008 he has been participating in numerous national and EU research projects.

Sándor Laki received the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Eötvös Loánd University, Budapest, Hungary, in 2007. Currently he is working towards his Ph.D. in computer science at the Department of Information Systems. His primal research interest includes Internet measurement techniques, adaptive protocols and network modeling, especially IP geolocation and bandwidth estimation. Since 2008 he is developing techniques to improve the accuracy of measurement-based IP geolocation and participating in national and EU research projects.

Yiannos Kryftis holds a graduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from National Technical University in Athens. He also holds an M.Sc. in Advance Computing from Imperial College in London. Currently, he is working as Ph.D. candidate for the National Technical University in Athens focusing on Virtualization Information Models and Algorithms in Federated Environments. His research interests include designs for the future internet architecture and policy based network management.

Vasilis Maglaris holds an Engineering Degree from the National Technical University of Athens–NTUA (1974) and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1979). Until 1989 he held industrial and academic positions in the USA. He subsequently joined the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at NTUA teaching and performing research on Internet technologies. He was responsible for establishing the NTUA campus network and the Greek National Research & Education Network GRNET. He served as Chairman of GÉANT, the European Research & Education Network (2006–2012). From July 2012 to June 2013 he served as the Secretary General for Research & Technology (GSRT) of Greece, responsible for planning and monitoring national research & innovation policies.

Cees de Laat, University of Amsterdam Cees de Laat chairs the System and Network Engineering (SNE) research group at the University of Amsterdam. Research in his group covers optical and switched networking for Internet transport and processing of massive amounts of data in TeraScale e-Science applications, Semantic Web to describe networks and associated e-infrastructure resources, distributed cross organization Authorization architectures and Systems Security & privacy of information in distributed environments. With SURFnet he develops and implements projects in SURFnet7 Research on Networks. He works together with the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in the NSF funded OptiPuter and GreenLight projects that have the purpose to create collaborative environments for scientists and to study the energy and carbon footprint of such infrastructure. Prof. de Laat serves as board member of Open Grid Forum and initiated the Green-Sonar working groups BOF’s at OGF to facilitate standard energy footprint information exchange in cyber-infrastructure, is chair of GridForum.nl and serves on the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Policy Board on matters regarding ESnet. He is co-founder and organizer of several of the past meetings of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) and founding member of http://www.cinegrid.org.

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