AutoI Completes Final Review

Last week I was in Brussels attending the FP7 project AutoI project final technical review. This was a 2.5 year project co-ordinated by Hitachi. The other partners in the consortium were Waterford Institute of Technology, Lip6, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Gingko Networks, University College of London, INRIA, University of Passau, University of Patras, Ucopia and Motorola.

The primary objective of the project was to research novel mechanisms that would enable service-based resource orchestration for virtualised networked. Or put another way, the autonomic provisioning of a virtualised network based on the requirements of a service. Based on the demands on the service, the virtualised resources can be self-optimised by adding or removing virtual resources or even moving virtual resources.

As well as representing the project, as workpackage leader I was presenting the result of Workpackage 3 Information Modelling. The objective of this workpackage was primarily to define a model that all the architectural components developed within AutoI would use to communicate with each other as well as providing a level of abstraction by hiding the heterogenous nature of the network and the vendor-specific data models. The model was supplemented by ontologies that augmented the model to support inferencing and reasoning. For example, if an alarm is reported for a specific network interface, what is the impact on the customer facing service? Is this somehing that an operator should be immediately concerned about? WP3 developed a Model Based Translator to perform the mediation. This is available as open source from the project website and already has been extended in EFIPSANS FP7 project which is still ongoing.

The project has now successfully concluded and I would like to thank the partners for their fruitful collaboration.