Autonomic Resource Regulation in IP Military Networks: A Situatedness Based Knowledge Plane
Gérard Nguengang, Thomas Bullot, Dominique Gaiti, Louis Hugues, Guy Pujolle · Birkhäuser Basel eBooks · 2007
During the last decade, networks have been growing dramatically on several dimensions: the number of users has been multiplied by more than 15, the amount of traffic by more than 100 and the number of network technologies and usages has also been diversified. One of the main consequences of this growth is the increase in dynamicity of the network behaviour. Therefore, it is more and more difficult for human operators to manage the network in an efficient way. That is why current research in the field of network management tends to automate network control and management. A large initiative has been proposed by IBM to give more autonomy to computing systems: Autonomic Computing Initiative. The paradigm of Autonomic Networking was introduced as an extension of Autonomic Computing, focusing on the autonomy of networks. At the centre of it lies knowledge management. In fact, to be self-managed, a network element needs to know a lot about its environment. But sharing a large amount of knowledge over a large network is very expensive in terms of resources. Therefore, new knowledge management mechanisms are required. A good example of networks that need to be autonomic is military networks. In fact, on one hand, military communication environment is very dynamic, and very uncertain; and on the other hand, quick decisions have to be triggered to guarantee -whenever it is possible- the connectivity for strategical communications. This paper proposes an interpretation of the Autonomic Networking paradigm, a description of a situatedness-based knowledge plane, and an instantiation of these concepts to a concrete application: resource regulation in IP military networks.