Consistency maintenance of policy states in decentralized autonomic network management

Autonomic network management is a vision that brings autonomic computing principles to network management. In this vision, the use of policies is a key aspect. Besides, it is necessary to add some level of decentralization to enable broad autonomic capabilities. Thus, the elements that build decentralized autonomic network management systems (known as autonomic management elements) must be policy-enabled. However, the consistency of policy states among autonomic management elements is an important challenge. Traditional mechanisms to maintain consistency of these states are supported by some centralization which wastes some desirable properties of decentralization. In contrast to these mechanisms, we propose a distributed, scalable and robust mechanism to maintain the consistency of policy states. In this paper we introduce multi-agent truth maintenance features in decentralized autonomic network management as a mechanism to bring consistency maintenance of policy states. We developed a model of a decentralized autonomic network management system on Peersim to perform simulation experiments. Besides, the utilization of policies in P2P-based autonomic network management systems is presented as case study.