Decentralized cooperative management: a bottom-up approach

Network services must self-adapt dynamically in order to accommodate available resources, system errors, and changing requirements. This need for self-reliance will increase with the growing flexibility and heterogeneity that characterizes such network technologies as sensor (ad hoc) networking, grid computing, and pervasive computing. The downside of traditional distributed network management techniques is that they do not take into account the design of each individual network node. We propose a bottom-up approach, i.e. providing a solid and adaptable architecture at the core of each network node, and on top of it a coordination and management platform that exploits the underlying flexibility. This paper proposes a node-architecture for decentralized cooperative management, structured as three clearly separated planes: (1) a communication plane that is designed with adaptability in mind, (2) a coordination plane that enables individual nodes to cooperate, and (3) a management plane that monitors the communication plane and adapts it when necessary.