Towards Semantic Modeling for QoS Specification

Quality of service is commonly specified through either a set of pre-defined APIs or a specification language. The former approach has inherent limitations that make QoS specification heuristic, while the latter largely remains at syntax level, which is strong in representation formats, but weak in the semantic interpretation of QoS specification. To overcome these limitations, we propose here a semantic QoS specification (SQS) framework, which (1) provides a uniform framework for QoS specification, (2) offers tailored specification support for different application domains, and (3) facilitates machine processing of QoS specification. We adopt an ontology-based approach in the design of SQS and introduce two generic models for a more flexibile, accurate and expressive QoS specification. Moreover, the ontology modeling principle of SQS is sufficiently general to apply to the modeling of other QoS systems, which facilitates information sharing and negotiation among QoS entities along the end-to-end path. Our experimental results show that SQS have exhibited the above advantages for QoS specification with acceptable overhead in term of processing latency