Introduction to Autonomic Concepts Applied to Future Self-Managed Networks

This chapter presents an overview of the autonomic concept as applied to networking and to network management. It highlights the different challenges faced by academia and industry. Despite the numerous efforts made in this area, as yet there is no agreement on either the architecture of autonomic networks or autonomic network management, nor is there any consensus on the knowledge plane. Standardization on this critical issue has not really started despite several initiatives with organizations such as IEEE and ETSI. This can be explained by the fact that the autonomic concept has led to the introduction of fundamental changes in the way networks will be built and controlled; therefore, the community has not yet reached agreement on the level of autonomic and determinism in the behavior of autonomic element. It is envisioned that some solutions will come from the industry such as those initiated by IBM in autonomic computing and if the experience is positive, perhaps it will be deployed on a small scale before being deployed globally. In any case, standardization does not affect all aspects of autonomic networking or network management but rather probably only the architecture and structure of the knowledge plan.