- The concept of autonomic
networking follows directly from the automatic computing.
- The initiation of the
autonomic computing was done by the IBM Corporation in the year of 2001.
- This
concept has been brought in to the present world networking scenario in order
to make the creation of self - managing networks possible.
- Self managing
networks are required for overcoming the complexity of the various networks
(including internet) that is increasing at a very rapid pace.
- This is also
necessary for the further growth of the networks i.e., beyond the network size
that we have today.
- Autonomic networking is a means for the management of the
network complexity.
- In future, it is quite a possibility that routers could not
be configured directly. - A point will come when it won’t be manageable by
humans.
- Autonomic networking will also minimize the manual intervention to a
large extent plus it will also cut down the dependencies on the operator.
- NMS
intervention will also be reduced.
- A fully – fledged autonomic network is
expected to be capable of the following:
Ø
Self –
configuration
Ø
Self –
protection
Ø
Self –
optimization
Ø
Self –
healing
- In traditional networking
systems, the amount of configuration, monitoring and reporting to be done is
very large and amount of routing is very less.
- In the autonomic
networking systems, things are just the opposite i.e., there is less amount of
intent, feedback and reporting and routing is more along with the other
operations such as discovery and autonomic interactions.
In autonomic
networking, there are 3 characteristics of the administrator interface:
- It
is abstract
- Light
weight
- Wide
scope
- The increasing complexity of the
network is viewed as a problem by most of the experts and that it might prove to
be hindrance in its usability in the
near future.
- Number of PDAs, game consoles and smart phones is increasing day
by day and these need an interconnection.
- Though such kind of pervasive
computing adds features but it also increases the burden on the networking infrastructure
that already exists since the number of tasks is so large that it is very
difficult for humans to manage alone. - Another thing that adds to the problem is
the cost of keeping a manual control on a number of devices in the infrastructure.
- Another important aspect is the price of manually
controlling huge numbers
of vitally important devices of current network
infrastructures.
- An analogy to autonomic nervous systems is the autonomic
nervous system
or ANS.
- This system regulates all the functions of the body and
its various organs.
- Autonomic network systems bear a close resemblance to the
ANS.
- Autonomic networking is all about adding more intelligence to the network.
- A number of complex operations are required to be carried out such as admission
control, authentication, billing, shaping, routing, policing, QoS prioritizing and video encoding for providing simple services to the customer.
There are a
number of problems in the way of network as mentioned below:
- The ever increasing size of the network.
- The heterogeneous nature of the applications and
devices.
- Increase in the requirement of service quality.
- Increase in the user expectations.
- Ever changing requirements.
- Changing context
- Pre – defined context is kept in while designing networks
with the traditional approaches.
- Whenever there is a change in the context, it
leads to more time consuming manual tasks.
- Algorithms used today do not have
the ability of detecting context changes and interpreting the policies.
- Such
manual management causes more loss and outages in the revenue of the
organization.
- In autonomic networking, the system itself optimizes the goals.
