Challenges for Autonomic Network Management

The improvement in the management capabilities and available bandwidth offered by next generation of networks is accelerating the development of a new kind of applications, interfaces and services. The ultimate goal of such networks is to automatically adapt their services and resources in accordance with changing environmental conditions and user needs. Such ‘autonomic’ capabilities imply the usage of sophisticated technologies in order to integrate every object of our environment that would be enabled with important computational power and storage capabilities. The challenge behind such implementation is to simplify the administrators’ task by automating the decision making process, and enabling the users to seamlessly find their way in such pervasive environments. This paper gives an overview of the different architectures that support the design, implementation and deployment of autonomic systems