Dissecting Self-* Properties

The scale and complexity of distributed systems have steadily grown in the recent years. Management of this complexity has drawn attention towards systems that can automatically maintain themselves throughout different scenarios. These systems have been described with many terms, such as self-healing, self-stabilizing, self-organizing, self-adaptive, self-optimizing, self-protecting, and self-managing. These attributes are collectively referred to as self-* properties. Even with the increased focus on self-* research, there exists much ambiguity in the perceptions of the different self-* properties. In this paper, we propose to resolve the ambiguity by introducing a template for defining self-* properties, and use it to offer formal definitions of existing self-* terms. We then present some observations about the relationships among the different self-* properties. Finally, we propose two new self-* properties that are meaningful in this space.