John Strassner

Towards autonomic management of communications networks

As communications networks become increasingly dynamic, heterogeneous, less reliable, and larger in scale, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to effectively manage these networks using traditional approaches that rely on human monitoring and intervention to ensure they operate within desired bounds. Researchers and practitioners are pursuing the vision of autonomic network management, which we view as the capability of network entities to self-govern their behavior within the constraints of business goals that the network as a whole seeks to achieve. However, applying autonomic principles to network management is challenging for a number of reasons, including: (1) A means is required to enable business rules to determine the set of resources and/or services to be provided. (2) Contextual changes in the network must be sensed and interpreted, because new management policies may be required when context changes. (3) As context changes, it may be necessary to adapt the management control loops that are used to ensure that system functionality adapts to meet changing user requirements, business goals, and environmental conditions. (4) A means is required to verify modeled data and to add new data dynamically so that the system can learn and reason about itself and its environment. This article provides an introduction to the FOCALE autonomic network management architecture, which is designed to address these challenges.

DEN-ng: achieving business-driven network management

Existing network management architectures suffer from a set of architectural and integration problems. Policy-based management was targeted to solve most of these problems, but its promises have not yet been fully realized. This paper presents a new approach to building network management solutions that is based on a new version of the DEN information model, called DEN-ng. DEN-ng is being designed to solve these problems by providing facilities to translate the business rules and procedures of an organization to the policies that configure and control its networks. Accordingly, the case is made for policy to become more than just a means for executing a change in a configuration file. Rather, it should be used to tie together configuration changes with how the changes should be done using a workflow system. This holistically binds business rules to the construction and deployment of configuration changes and their management.

Policy-based architecture to enable autonomic communications - a position paper

The increase in complexity of network management systems and a consequent lack of association to business requirements has driven the need for autonomic communications. By integrating context information, autonomic computing can provide more efficient means to counter technical problems found in complex network systems and at the same time address associated business requirements. In this paper, we propose an autonomic communications architecture that manages complexity through policy-based management where we incorporate a shared information model integrated with knowledge-based reasoning mechanisms to provide self- governaning behavior.

A hierarchical approach to autonomic network management

Recently, the autonomic communication networks paradigm has been introduced as a solution to the increasing management complexity of communication networks in the Future Internet. In order to encompass the large-scale nature of these networks, a general consensus has been reached that the supporting autonomic management architectures should be distributed for scalability reasons. However, several open issues related to the distribution of autonomic components remain to be solved. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to structuring distributed autonomic components in large-scale communication networks. The approach is generic and can be applied to many existing autonomic architectures and control loops. The autonomic components are structured in a hierarchy, which simplifies the interaction between components, and allows them to manage resources and govern child components in a more scalable manner. In addition to giving a detailed description of the hierarchical architecture, the advantages of the proposed approach are validated through analytical evaluation results.

Autonomic personalized handover decisions for mobile services in heterogeneous wireless networks

In this paper, we present an autonomic management method to provide personalized handover decisions for customized mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks. A handover decision is a significant problem, especially in a heterogeneous network environment. This is exacerbated when the goal is to provide personalized services for mobile users. Personalized handover decisions should not only consider received signal strength, which is a traditional handover decision factor, but also context information, user preferences, user profiles, and other non-functional requirements. We present two metrics for evaluating access points: access point acceptance value and access point satisfaction value. Our algorithm uses a combination of functional and non-functional metrics to select the access point that has the maximum satisfaction value. In our simulation study, we show that our decision algorithm is better than other decision algorithms in terms of end user satisfaction.

The Design of a New Context-Aware Policy Model for Autonomic Networking

This paper describes a new version of the DEN-ng context model, and how this model in conjunction with the DEN-ng policy model can be used for more effective and flexible context management. Both are part of the FOCALE autonomic network architecture. Context selects policies, which select roles that can be used, which in turn define allowed functionality for that particular context.

An ontology-driven semantic bus for autonomic communication elements

Recently, autonomics have been proposed as a solution to tackle the ever-increasing management complexity of large-scale computing and communications infrastructures. Over time, the control loops used to orchestrate the intelligent behaviour of autonomic management architectures have evolved from fully static to highly-dynamic loops comprised of loosely coupled management components. Communication and other interactions between these components is facilitated by a communications substrate. Additionally, in order to achieve truly autonomic behaviour, the interacting components need to be able to understand each other, justifying the need for semantically enriched communications. In this paper, we present a novel semantic communications bus that orchestrates interactions between the components of an autonomic control loop. It employs ontology-based reasoning in order to establish communication contracts, validate message consistency and support semantic topic subscriptions. Additionally, a prototype was designed, implemented and its performance evaluated.

Autonomic networking theory and practice

Summary form only given. A new genre of management applications is required to accommodate current and future uses of network services. The key to solving this problem is to realize that currently, network operation is divorced from how the business operates, and that current approaches do not address this problem. This tutorial discusses the four key foundational elements of solving this problem - use of standard information models, the transformation of these information models to a set of data models to suit the characteristics of different management data, the holistic combination of policy and process management, and a distributed interface oriented architecture that can realize the power of the previous three elements. The foundation for this tutorial lies in work done in the Telemanagement Forums NGOSS program and the DEN-ng information model, tempered by current research in autonomic computing. After briefly covering these areas, the tutorial concentrates on new research that focuses on implementing an autonomic network - an area that has been overlooked in current research. New enhancements on the OMGs Model Driven Architecture initiative is described that enables code to be generated from formal models. This is supplemented with work on holistically combining process and policy management, and implementing this in a distributed service-oriented architecture. Real-life examples are used to reinforce the contents of this tutorial. In addition, a case study that follows the development of an MPLS VPN is used in each section to show how the concepts presented in this tutorial can be used to solve todays business problems.

Semantic context dissemination and service matchmaking in future network management

The ever-increasing size, complexity and heterogeneity of telecommunications networks necessitate the introduction of autonomic elements that assist providers in managing and configuring the networks resources. To tackle this increased complexity, it is expected that many specialized autonomic elements will take part in the management process. It becomes necessary for them to collaborate and communicate in order to achieve high-level, human-specified, management goals. Therefore, the need for a scalable mechanism to facilitate the interactions between autonomic elements has arisen. This article presents a communications bus, augmented with semantics through the use of ontologies and semantic reasoning, which governs the communication and collaboration between autonomic elements. It supports filtering of context based on meaning. Additionally, it facilitates matchmaking of autonomic element goals with management services using semantic definitions of their inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects. Furthermore, the delay introduced by semantic reasoning was evaluated through an implemented prototype and was shown to be limited to only a few milliseconds. Copyright

Federation, a matter of autonomic management in the Future Internet

In the Future Internet, free exchange of information between enterprise applications and networking systems promotes the personalization of services and enables many different types of end-user applications and management operations optimizing the network performance. As result of this free information exchange, we need to facilitate the federation of information between these applications, harmonizing the differences between operation, management data and information models in heterogeneous networks, and application management systems. This paper concentrates on identifying the research challenges that we have to address in the areas of software engineering and network management supporting federation. In particular, we describe research challenges for federated management systems highlighting the flexibility these systems can offer in the Future Internet communications, when they are able to support value-added federated end-to-end services. As part of our approach, semantic techniques are cited to represent networking information governing technology and/or network protocols offering a wide diversity of end-to-end services as a result of this transparent information sharing process.