A hierarchical approach to autonomic service management
Jeroen Famaey · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2009
As computer networks grow more complex, heterogeneous and larger in scale, it becomes increasingly difficult for human administrators to manage and configure such systems. Additionally, services offered across the Internet (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) have drastically increased in numbers and diversity. To alleviate the problems associated with managing large, complex and diverse computer networks, researchers have proposed the principle of autonomic communication networks [1]. The goal of autonomic networking is to allow networks to manage themselves, based on highlevel business goals set by human administrators. The autonomic elements use knowledge gathered from the network to adapt their behaviour under changing conditions, in order to keep achieving the predefined business goals. Although some progress has been made towards a completely self-governing autonomic service delivery network, several important challenges remain to be overcome. Among them is scalability, which is defined as the ability of the system to keep functioning properly in face of increasing network size, number of services, and end-users count. In this paper, we introduce a novel autonomic architecture for deliving services across the Internet, which aims to solve scalability issues of current autonomic network architectures.