Policy-based Automated WAN Configuration and Management

Our project aims at developing a description language allowing network administrators to specify policies for desired configuration and operation of their networks, networked devices, and applications at a high abstraction level. We ground the language ontologies and rules in the W3C Web Ontology Language and the W3C Semantic Web Rule Language. We formally prove that our language is sound and complete. We employ incremental tests to build acceptance within user community and demonstrate through use cases and concepts of operations of DoD and commercial enterprise networks that the language is perfect for capturing and expressing cross-layer configuration policies. Our project also aims at designing a cognitive, agent-based system capable of maintaining, verifying, and diagnosing network configurations based on policies defined in our language and responding to aberrant behavior. We develop a secure, distributed knowledge base, advanced expert reasoning technologies, and distributed validation, verification, and enforcement models enabling cognitive agents to collaboratively configure and manage networks. We investigate the feasibility and system benefits for transitioning the system to DoD and commercial customers.