My colleague Wedge Greene of LTC International recently introduced me to an intriguing concept, Autonomic Communcation, by sharing a presentation he gave at the OnPoint “Transforming OSS” conference in Dallas on February 7, 2008. I had read earlier about the work IBM has been doing in autonomic computing, when I worked with a small company, Lockstep Systems, that had technology for automatic restoration of hacked web sites. Wedge’s presenation was the first information I had read about the application of autonomic principles to large computer networks.

In his presentation, Wedge proposes that networks should be “self-organizing and self-managing,” exhibiting characteristics of:

• Self-configuration
• Self optimization
• Self-healing
• self-monitoring
• self-diagnostics
• self-restoration

He furthermore proposes that such autonomic networks can be built with existing technology and with known skills, but to do so requires the will to act by technology vendors acting in harmony with each other.

Wedge suggests the following forums for further participation in this subject:

• Autonomic Communication Forum (ACForum)
• BIONETS (BIOlogicallyinspired NETworkand Services)
• Open Grid Forum/ Global Grid Forum
• The Task Force on Autonomous and Autonomic Systems (TFAAS)
• Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA)
• CASCADAS: (Component-ware for Autonomic Situation-aware Communications, and Dynamically Adaptable Services)
• Serenity Forum
• HAGGLE – An innovative Paradigm for Autonomic Opportunistic Communication

Additionally, I found that Wikipedia had an interesting article on Autonomic Networking.

This is certainly an intriguing subject with strong benefit if it can be applied on a broad scale. I plan to keep my eyes peeled.

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