An evaluation of autonomic self-configuration in network centric systems

The proliferation of internet technologies, services and devices, have made the current network system designs and management tools incapable of designing reliable, secure networked systems and services. The complexity of current system had led researchers to consider alternative designs and management techniques that are based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with complexity, heterogeneity and uncertainty. The approach is referred to as autonomic computing. An autonomic computing system is the system that has the capabilities of being self-defining, self-healing, self-configuring, self- optimizing, etc. In this paper, we present our approach to implement an autonomic computing infrastructure. Autonomia provides dynamically programmable control and management services to support autonomic configuration and deployment in network centric system. The AUTONOMIA[11] environment provides application developers with all the tools required to specify the appropriate control and management schemes in order to maintain any quality of service requirement or application attribute/functionality (e.g., performance, fault, security, etc.). We have successfully implemented a proof-of-concept prototype system that can support the self-configuring and self-deployment function of any network application. We have showed how AUTONOMIA self-configuring handler can automatically setup and run applications in a network centric environment with a wide range of requirements. The performance gain that can be achieved from automating the configuration and execution of network centric applications can be two orders of magnitude when compared with manually configuration and execution.