Ontology-Based Semantic Priority Scheduling for Multi-domain Active Measurements

Network control and management techniques (e.g., dynamic path switching and on-demand bandwidth provisioning) rely on active measurements of the end-to-end network status. The measurements are needed to meet network monitoring objectives such as network weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and fault-diagnosis. Recent widespread deployment of openly accessible multi-domain active measurement frameworks, such as perfSONAR, has resulted in users competing for system and network measurement resources. Hence, there is a need to prioritize measurement requests of users before they are scheduled on measurement resources. In this paper, we present a novel ontology-based semantic priority scheduling algorithm (SPS) that handles resource contention while servicing measurement requests for meeting network monitoring objectives. We adopt ontologies to formalize semantic definitions and develop an inference engine to dynamically prioritize measurement requests. The prioritization is based upon user roles, user sampling preferences, resource policies, and oversampling mitigation factors. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that our SPS algorithm outperforms existing deterministic and heuristic algorithms in terms of user ‘satisfaction ratio’ and ‘average stretch’ among serviced measurement requests. Further, by sampling experiments on real-network perfSONAR measurement data sets, we show that our SPS algorithm successfully mitigates oversampling and further improves the satisfaction ratio. Our SPS scheme and evaluation results are vital to manage large-scale measurement infrastructures used for meeting monitoring objectives in the next-generation applications and networks.