Leveraging self-description to visualise autonomic networks

Abstract

The ANA (Autonomic Networking Architecture) project provides a framework to design, create, and federate different network architectures. ANA considers that different network paradigms require their own network architecture and internal policies. The present work describes how the self-description property of autonomic systems is used by the ANA Browser visualisation tool to allow a human user to inspect how an ANA network works internally. The ANA Browser extends the classical network visualisation with a description of the functional configuration which may vary considerably amongst different ANA networks and also might vary at run-time on such polymorphic networks.