Monitoring within an Autonomic Network: A GANA Based Network Monitoring Framework

The concept of self-managing of autonomic networks is a paradigm shift from today's management models, aiming at enabling networked nodes to self manage their behaviour within the constrains of the operator's policies and objectives. In this article, we present our approach for self-coordinating monitoring functions within such an autonomic network. This approach complies with the principles of a recently introduced Reference Model for autonomic network engineering/self-management within node and network architectures dubbed: the Generic Autonomic Network Architecture (GANA), which aims to identify autonomic behaviours realised via hierarchical control loops among self-managing elements. The components of the proposed monitoring framework, the interactions among the identified elements and a complete use case scenario are described in detail.