Towards Autonomic and Situation-Aware Communication Services: the CASCADAS Vision

The complexity of modern networks raises several challenges in the design and development of communication services. The unbearable costs in configuration and management call for autonomic approaches, in which services are able to self-configure and self-adapt their activities without human intervention. The need for ubiquity of service provisioning calls for the capability of services of adapting their behavior depending on the current situation in which they are used. In this paper, after having discussed the need for innovative approaches facilitating the development and execution of autonomic and situation-aware services, we analyze the key features that should underly such a general approach, propose an architecture centered around the abstraction of "autonomic communication elements", and sketch the main research thrusts to be pursued for the realization of the vision