Autonomic networking - theory and practice

Summary form only given. A new genre of management applications is required to accommodate current and future uses of network services. The key to solving this problem is to realize that currently, network operation is divorced from how the business operates, and that current approaches do not address this problem. This tutorial discusses the four key foundational elements of solving this problem - use of standard information models, the transformation of these information models to a set of data models to suit the characteristics of different management data, the holistic combination of policy and process management, and a distributed interface oriented architecture that can realize the power of the previous three elements. The foundation for this tutorial lies in work done in the Telemanagement Forum´s NGOSS program and the DEN-ng information model, tempered by current research in autonomic computing. After briefly covering these areas, the tutorial concentrates on new research that focuses on implementing an autonomic network - an area that has been overlooked in current research. New enhancements on the OMG´s Model Driven Architecture initiative is described that enables code to be generated from formal models. This is supplemented with work on holistically combining process and policy management, and implementing this in a distributed service-oriented architecture. Real-life examples are used to reinforce the contents of this tutorial. In addition, a case study that follows the development of an MPLS VPN is used in each section to show how the concepts presented in this tutorial can be used to solve today´s business problems.