Experiments on the Automatic Evolution of Protocols Using Genetic Programming

Truly autonomic networks ultimately require self-modifying, evolving protocol software. Otherwise humans must intervene in every situation that has not been anticipated at design time. For this to become feasible autonomic systems must ensure non-disruptive on-line software evolution. We investigate related code steering techniques in two directions: One is the fully automatic selection of protocol service elements where, depending on device characteristics and current operation environment, each communication entity has to select among a potentially wide variety of protocol implementations providing similar services. The other direction relates to the automatic synthesis of new protocol elements which are the result of optimizing existing implementations for a specific context. In both cases we look at genetic programming as a tool to generate new code and software configurations automatically. In this paper we propose a framework for such a resilient protocol evolution and report on first exploratory results on the adaptation and re-adaptation to environmental conditions, and the elimination of superfluous code.

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