Autonomic Networks
From Capsil Wiki
As the number of nodes and number of networks grow in large assisted living technology deployments self-managing networks will become a key requirement to ensure the capability to scale massively. Automated networks will play a key role in achieving this goal. However this area is relatively embryonic in nature. More research remains to be carried out. Important areas of focus should include:
- Self-Healing - Discover, diagnose, and react to network disruptions. Self-healing components can detect system malfunctions or failures and start corrective actions based on defined policies to recover the network or node. This ensures network reliability and availability.
- Self-Optimization: Monitor and configure resources dynamically based on pre-defined policies. For example reallocating resources in response to changing workloads to improve overall utilization, or ensuring that particular business transactions are completed in a timely fashion.
- Self-Configuration: Change configuration parameters to adapt dynamically under varying conditions and network states. This management service self-configures and reconfigures the network elements under varying and even unpredictable conditions.
- Self-Protection: Anticipate, detect, identify and protect against threats (internal or external, accidental or malicious) and guarantee security.
- Self-Awareness: This is where the node ‘learns’ about its environment and its activities context and acts accordingly. It finds and generates rules to best interact with neighbour entities.
- Self-Knowledge: The service that allows a node to ‘know itself’. For example, an entity that governs itself should know its components, current state, capacity, and all the connections with other entities. It needs to know the extension of its resources that can be loaned and borrowed.
- Self Maintenance: This service allows an entity to monitor its components and dynamically re-configure itself to achieve pre-determined goals.
These key characteristics of Autonomic Networks can be summarised into four broad functions, these are:
- 1. Monitor – What’s going on in the network
- 2. Analyse – Analyse the monitored data, often complex and arrive at some conclusions (maybe something is wrong, corrective action needed etc)
- 3. Plan – Based on the conclusions at the analyse stage, plan what to do about it.
- 4. Execute – Execute the plan to resolve the situation.
These are the four broad areas that research needs to focus on and prototype systems that demonstrate these functions will provide meaningful contributions to the development of these areas. There are many papers on individual aspects of these Autonomic Networks such as self healing or self configuration; however there is not much material demonstrating an entire solution with all of the above functions and this is an open research challenge going forward.
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