Chapter 6 - A Self-Organizing Architecture for Scalable, Adaptive, and Robust Networking

Abstract

This chapter proposes a self-organizing network architecture in which each node, network, layer, and network system is self-organized through intra and interlayer mutual interactions. The hierarchical architecture of self-modules can also be found in autonomic computing and the autonomic network, but the idea is different by organizing the whole network system following the self-organization principle. For self-organization engines, the chapter uses biologically inspired models. Much previous research has been dedicated to bio-inspired and self-organized control, but the major difference from the other approaches is that adopt the biological behavior modeled is adopted by nonlinear differential equations to enable a mathematical discussion and achieve high adaptability. Based on the knowledge and experience, it is recognized that a self-organizing system is not necessarily optimal and does not always guarantee the best performance. However, it is considered it is worth sacrificing performance to some extent to achieve scalability, adaptability, and robustness. We plan to investigate the consequences of intra- and interlayer interactions between different self-organizing behaviors in order to derive a generic design methodology of self-organizing network systems.