The development of network technologies and networked services has been
tremendous the last decade and is expected to be more intensive in the near
future with the technological progress in the field of radio communications,
data communication, protocols, software engineering, applications and so on.
In this plethora of technologies, operators as well as administrators are facing
more and more complex failures and dysfunctions of their networks. The
management of these problems are reaching the limit of human experts requiring
skills and knowledge that are expensive and difficult to acquire. Several
directions are under investigation to find solution to these problems without
human intervention. Among these directions, Autonomic Network Management
aims at introducing more self-management in existing equipments, protocols
and services to allow networks to self-recover and to autonomically adjust to
new situation. Autonomic Network Management takes its essences from several
advances in researches from networking, computing, intelligent systems,
data engineering, etc. It requires essential cross disciplinary research to overcome
the challenges posed by existing and future complex and heterogeneous
communication, networking and applications technologies.
This book aims at presenting the basic principle of autonomics and how they
could apply to build Autonomic Network Management Architecture through
several experiences presented by several well recognized experts in the area
that have contributed to significant advances in the area. These contributors
from research laboratory and industry present their results in different application
areas to provide the reader with up-to-date information about this novel
approach in network management. The contributions aims to cover wide range
of management domains as well as reference architectures inspired from autonomic
computing, biology, and intelligent decision systems. Hopefully, the
contributions covers all the interests of specialists, researchers and students
in the area tackling different levels of network architecture from the core network
management to wire and wireless access networks management including
promising technologies such as sensor networks.