Semantic Techniques for Reconfiguring and Adapting Networks in Pervasive Environments

Computing and networking technologies are becoming ever more pervasive in order to support their users ’ increasingly dynamic lifestyles. These technologies aim to increase the networks ’ awareness of their users ’ requirements. At the same time, they strive to reduce the amount of manual reconfiguration and explicit interaction between the users and the network resources. The main problem is the extreme difficulty in reconfiguring the network’s resources at runtime and in adapting the network’s behaviour automatically according to the changes happening in the surroundings. To address these issues, we investigated the use of the emerging semantic web technologies, policies, and context information. We also developed an ontology-based reasoning machinery to address the problem of automated adaptability. In this paper, we provide an analysis of the ontologies we developed and the reasoning machinery required to increase the network’s awareness of its context. We report on the experiments we conducted to evaluate the techniques we are proposing