Distributed autonomic management: An approach and experiment towards managing service-centric networks

This paper describes a novel approach for managing service-centric communications networks called distributed autonomic management (DAM). Current approaches to network management employ the client/server model, cooperative stationary agents, and/or non-intelligent mobile agents. The DAM model consists of communities of mobile and stationary intelligent agents in collaboration. We discuss an experiment with DAM and proceed to discuss outstanding research issues. The DAM approach uses the properties and characteristics of autonomic systems in support of managing service-oriented communications networks and protecting e-commerce and business enterprises against cyber terrorism.