Network Descriptions and NEC

The network is one of the most important components of NEC. In order to achieve high levels of agility and flexibility it is important that all users and providers have a good overview of the capabilities and possibilities of the network. Historically network applications have used their own discovery mechanisms and network representation, making it hard to share and interoperate. In this paper we present our work on improving the management of the TITAAN tactical network. To do this, we used NDL – Network Description Language – a data model offering users and network providers with a common ontology to describe topology information of networks. The strength of NDL is that it provides an interoperable model for network descriptions, that is, the same description can be used as input to different applications, such as visualisation, and asset management, but also path-finding. The common information source is particularly important when considering inter-domain or multi-national network connections. Since NDL is based on Semantic Web techniques, it is straightforward to parse and export to NDL, or to relate NDL with application-specific ontologies. By listening in on the management traffic of the TITAAN network we are able to automatically create NDL descriptions of the network. These descriptions are used to monitor the status of the network, to determine which paths will be used between nodes in the network. This allows the administrators to monitor the network and quickly determine possible bottlenecks.