A Proactive Policy-Based Management Approach Towards Autonomic Communications

The growth and evolution of the Internet and the rapid adoption of new wireless, mobile, and self-organizing networks and new services are constantly adding complexity and costs in network management. The traditional manual and static network management paradigm fits poorly into the changing environment where human efforts should be kept at a minimum, and gradually replaced by technologies themselves. We introduce a novel network self-management scheme. Our goal is to seek the synergy between autonomic management, policy-based manage- ment, and autonomic control. They all form the Architecture for Network Autonomy (ANA) that strives to realize proactive policy- based network management for autonomic communications. In this paper, we study the related work, describe the design considerations of ANA as well as its current implementation status, and present the initial results gathered. The Internet continues to grow and evolute, with rapid adoption of new wireless, mobile, and broadband networks. The trend of everything over IP and IP connects everything is being made self-evident by a myriad of sensors, devices, terminals, hosts that are penetrating into each single domain of modern work and life. Numerous services and applications, span WANs, LANs, vehicles, offices, homes, down to human bodies. All of this has convoluted the crisis of Internet manage- ment, in particular the spatio-temporal complexity of network dynamics, and the management and control difficulties. The traditional way of manual planning, configuration, trouble- shooting, and performance tuning will be exorbitantly ex- pensive or even dominate operational cost, as opposite to hardware/software improvements that continuously help to reduce capital expenses. The shortage of skilled labor and the limits of human management of complex systems are complicating the problem further. Besides the looming complexity, the relatively static and time-consuming procedure of conventional network manage- ment calls for new efforts to react to the dynamics and scale of the networks (considering their sheer sizes and traffic volume) in a timely manner. Even more essential is the mapping and bridging between the high-level management constraints and low-level configuration rules, with the latter being the implementation of the former. In doing so the users and administrators can remain control at a high and abstract level by specifying only objectives, and the system will self-govern itself towards realizing the high-level policies, and behaves as expected. Such paradigm requires new system architecture, network model, protocol stack, as well as algorithms for network self-management. In the rest of this paper, we first review the related work in Section 2 that covers three main areas, namely autonomic communications, policy-based management, and the semantic web technologies. Based on this, we present the architecture for network autonomy in Section 3. This is followed by Section 4 on the details of the design and implementation of our prototype. We also show some initial evaluation results in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 highlights the concluding remarks and outlines the directions of future work.