Demystifying self-awareness of autonomic systems

Self-awareness is a much discussed property of autonomic and self-managed networks. Attempting to demystify this property we show that it can be captured by a Self Awareness Function (SAF) that stems from the assessment of process correctness of autonomic and cognitive networks. Based on multiple position papers that were written in isolation we are able to identify various SAFs (for trust, security, dynamics control, service deployment), as well as associated research issues (information modelling, higher contextualisation, convergence, etc.). We show that multiple issues of self-management that create a tangled hierarchy of control loops can be systematically addressed with SAF in mind