Self-Aware Networks and QoS

Abstract — Novel user oriented networked systems will simultaneously exploit a variety of wired and wireless communication modalities to offer different levels of quality-of-service (QoS), including reliability and security to users, low economic cost and performance. Within a single such user oriented network, different connections themselves may differ from each other with respect to QoS needs. Similarly, the communication infrastructure used by such a network will, in general, be shared among many different networks and users so that the resources available will fluctuate over time, both on the long and short term. Such a user oriented network will not usually have precise information about the infrastructure it is using at any given instant of time, so that its knowledge should be acquired from on-line observations. Thus we suggest that user oriented networks should exploit self-adaptiveness to try to obtain the best possible QoS for all their connections. In this paper we review experiments which illustrate how “self-awareness”, through on-line self-monitoring and measurement, coupled with intelligent adaptive behaviour in response to observations, can be used to offer QoS. Our presentation is based on ongoing experimental work with several “Cognitive Packet Network ” (CPN) test-beds that we have developed. I