Today's model of networking primarily concentrates intelligence at the end hosts with the network itself offering a simple"best-effort","data agnostic" communication medium. However, this paradigm has proven to be insufficient to meet todays needs considering the diversity of applications and devices that are networked. To offer value added services to these end users and applications, more and more intelligence needs to be migrated away from the edges and into the network in a controlled and tractable manner. In this paper, we present our approach of utilizing semantic data tagging to provide content level information for data streams flowing through a network. A policy based management mechanism is utilized within the network fabric allowing routers to reason over the content and make intelligent decisions regarding the handling of data packets. Service differentiation, in-network content adaptation, traffic monitoring and control etc. are some of the new services that can now be offered by the network in a generic and flexible manner. By deploying our proposed architecture, a network need no longer be viewed as a simple data transport medium but rather as a policy-controlled intelligent packet/stream processor that can offer specialized handling based on application needs.

Abstract-Policy based networks provide high levels of flexibility by allowing definition of packet handling rules within a network, resource allocation strategies, network management, or access control. Commonly used policy specification mechanisms are, however, limited in their expressibility and rely mostly on packet headers that convey limited information about the semantics of the content. We propose a new model for policy based networking that utilizes the W3C Web Ontology Language tags carried in data packets that can provide detailed semantic information about the packet or stream. Using this model, a policy decision point can reason over these tags and infer the correct set of operations to invoke. Policies are expressed in the W3C Semantic Web Rule Language using a common ontology and take into consideration the content of the streams, relevant contextual information and external domain constraints. Using this framework, fine grained, highly specialized services can be offered within the network that are context-aware, easy to manage, deploy and verify for consistency.

A mobile ad-hoc network is an autonomous system of mobile routers that are self-organizing and completely decentralized

Policies in BGP are implemented as routing configurations that determine how route information is shared among neighbors to control traffic flows across networks. This process is generally template driven, device centric, limited in its expressibility, time consuming and error prone which can lead to configurations where policies are violated or there are unintended consequences that are difficult to detect and resolve. In this paper, we propose an alternate mechanism for policy based networking that relies on using additional semantic information associated with routes expressed in an OWL ontology. Policies are expressed using SWRL to provide fine-grained control where by the routers can reason over their routes and determine how they need to be exchanged. In this paper, we focus on security related BGP policies and show how our framework can be used in implementing them. Additional contextual information such as affiliations and route restrictions are incorporated into our policy specifications which can then be reasoned over to infer the correct configurations that need to be applied, resulting in a process which is easy to deploy, manage and verify for consistency.

In recent years, UWB has received much attention as a suitable Physical Layer (PHY) for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANS). UWB allows for low cost, low power, high bandwidth, short reach communication well suited for personal operating spaces. One of the key features offered by UWB is very accurate ranging between a transmitter/receiver pair. The IEEE 802.15.3 is a MAC protocol that has been proposed for WPANs. In this MAC, a combination of CSMA/CA and TDMA is used to achieve channel scheduling. The TDMA component ensures only one transmitter/receiver pair within a piconet is active at any given time thereby ensuring an exclusion region that covers the whole piconet. In this paper, we propose a less stringent scheduling mechanism that allows for concurrent communication between UWB transmitter/receiver pairs within a piconet. Exclusion is necessary only when the communicating entities are close enough such that interference between them would adversely affect successful reception of data at the receivers. The Piconet Coordinator (PNC) uses the ranging information provided by UWB to accurately position transmitters and receivers. The PNC schedules parallel transmissions between distinct transmit/receive pairs as long as they do not interfere. We present the results of our simulations of our proposed modifications and show that the network throughput can be significantly increased with very little change to the 802.15.3 MAC.