Autonomic Management of Communications Networks & Services

Project Overivew

This research programme seeks to develop novel methodologies, architectures, processes and algorithms to enable autonomic network management. The essence of autonomic management is the ability for a system to self-govern its behaviour within the constraints of the business goals the system as a whole seeks to achieve.

Project Implementation

To achieve autonomic network management we have proposed the use of information modelling to capture knowledge relating to network capabilities, environmental constraints and business goals/policies, together with reasoning and learning techniques to enhance and evolve this knowledge. In our framework knowledge embedded within system models can be used by policy-based network management systems that incorporate translation / code generation and policy enforcement processes that automatically configure network elements in response to changing business goals and/or environmental context.

This realises an autonomic control loop, in which the system senses changes in the itself and its environment, analyses this information to ensure that business goals and objectives are being met; expedites changes should these goals and objectives be threatened, and observes the result to ascertain if the system has reached the desired state.

The project commenced in November 2004, and will complete October 2008. For more information please contact Mícheál Ó Foghlú, mofoghlu@tssg.org.