Towards a global autonomic management and integration of heterogeneous networks and multimedia services

Abs t rac t . Traditionally, networks and systems are manually managed. It usually takes one or more human operators to manage all aspects of a dynamically evolving computing and communicating system. The operator is tightly integrated in this management process, and his tasks range from defining high-level policies to executing low-level system commands for immediate problem solving. Although this form of human-in-the-loop management was appropriate in the past, it has become increasingly unsuitable for modern networked computing systems and telecommunication. The potential advantage that autonomic computing brings is reducing the cost and complexity of managing Information and Communication Technology Infrastructure(ICT). The objectives of this paper are to underline the characteristics of autonomic architectures and present an outline of our autonomic management architecture based on OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) and Peer-to-Peer model. The autonomic management architectures of CISCO and IBM are briefly described and compared with our autonomic management architecture.