Gerenciamento autônomo de redes na Internet do futuro

Autonomous networking research to applies intelligent agent and multiagent systems theory to network controlling mechanisms. Deploying such autonomous and rational entities in the network can improve its behavior in the presence of very dynamic and complex control scenarios. Unfortunately, building agent-based mechanisms for networks is not an easy task. The main difficulty is to create concise knowledge representations about network domains and reasoning mechanisms to deal with them. Furthermore, the Internet makes the design of multiagent systems for network controlling a challenging activity involving the modeling of different participants with diverse beliefs and intentions. Such type of system often poses scalability problems due to the lack of incentives for cooperation between administrative domains. Finally, as the current structure of the Internet often prevents innovation, constructed autonomous networking mechanisms are not fully deployed in large scale scenarios. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is in the realm of Future Internet efforts. In the SDN paradigm, packet forwarding hardware is controlled by software running as a separated control plane. Management software uses an open protocol to program the flowtables in different switches and routers. This work presents a general discussion about the integration of autonomous networks and software-defined networks. Based on the knowledge offered by this discussion, it presents a framework that provides autonomy to SDN domains allowing them to act cooperatively when deployed in scenarios with distributed management. Two case studies are presented for important open issues in the Internet: (1) the problem of mitigating DDoS attacks when thousands of attackers perform malicious packet flooding and SDN domains must cooperate to cope with packet filtering at the source; (2) the problem of network traffic management when multiple domains must cooperate and modify routing primitives.