Business-driven Network Management

The essence of autonomic management is the ability for a system to self-govern its behavior within the constraints of the (human-specified) goals that the system as a whole is set to achieve. We promote the use of information and ontological modeling to capture knowledge relating to network capabilities, environmental constraints and business goals/policies, together with reasoning and learning techniques to enhance and evolve this knowledge. Knowledge embedded within system models is used by context-aware, policy-based network management systems incorporating translation/code generation and policy enforcement processes that automatically configure network elements in response to changing business goals and/or environmental context. This realizes a continuum of autonomic control loops in which the system senses changes in itself and its environment, analyses this information to ensure that business goals and objectives are being met; expedites changes should these goals and objectives be threatened, and, closing the loop, observes the result.

Combining Information Models with Ontologies and Algorithms

We believe the information and ontological modeling based approach delivers considerable improvements over existing manually configured network management systems, since it does support context-driven reconfiguration of networks with minimal human intervention at all but the high-level business view. Nevertheless, in order to deliver full autonomic network management capabilities, we believe it is also necessary to introduce decentralized processes and algorithms into the network infrastructure to maintain optimal or near-optimal behavior in terms of global stability, improved performance and adaptability, robustness and security. However, to ensure that they act in accordance with business goals, we argue that such processes and algorithms should themselves be modeled, so that their operation can be automatically configured via appropriate management policies.

From an Idea to the Implementation