Autonomic Communication Research Articles

A self-adaptation-based approach to resilience improvement of complex internets of utility systems

Resilience improvement of complex internets of utility systems is still an open issue for the current research. Proposed solutions fail to implement an integrated approach to detection, mitigation, and reaction which is able to face both well-known and new, previously unknown cyber-attacks (in particular distributed ones, which constitute one of the most serious and still unresolved threat scenarios affecting networked systems). In this work, we present the conceptual architecture of a novel multi-layer distributed Intrusion Detection and Reaction System based on the Autonomic Communication paradigm. The architecture relies on a self-organizing cooperative overlay network of complementary components that are dynamically and autonomously adapted to face distributed cyberattacks against Industrial Control Systems. The proposed architecture aims at being a guideline for experts and practitioners to address the well-known problem of distributed nature of new types of cyber-attacks, by implementing mechanisms to orchestrate available resources for effective detection and remediation dynamically. A distributed flow monitoring system provides input data to cooperative intrusion detection agents, which allow correlating information from heterogeneous feeds to improve the identification of attacks originating from both the inside and the outside of the monitored network and to support customizable remediation mechanisms.

Design of an autonomic communication system

In modern communication systems, it is necessary to develop new approaches to optimise them. To achieve this objective, new paradigms are necessary. The present work proposes the conception of an autonomic communication system, which is based on a Bayesian network and on an ontology, to take reconfiguration decisions in the system. The ontology provides the knowledge about the performance factors and their relationships in the communication networks, to configure the structure of the Bayesian network. The Bayesian network is the stochastic reasoning mechanism used by the decision-making system. We present several tests on the NS2 simulator, and we observe an improvement in the system performance, for scenarios with high reconfiguration requirements.

Design of an autonomic communication system

Design of an autonomic communication system

Relaxing and Communication-Promoting Effects of Wooden Tableware at Workplace Social Gathering

<em>Human beings are thought to have evolved in close contact with wood and touching wood is known to have relaxing effects. In 10 health subjects participating workplace social gathering, the effects of the use of wooden tableware on autonomic functions and communication were examined in comparison to the use of porcelain-metal tableware with a crossover study design. Analysis of pulse rate variability revealed that, compared to porcelain-metal tableware, wooden tableware lowered the amplitude of low-frequency (LF, 0.04-0.15 Hz) component without affecting the amplitude of high-frequency (HF, 0.15-0.45 Hz) component, resulting lower LF-to-HF ratio. Communication measured by the total number of utterances did not differ with the type of tableware. Subjective evaluation by a post questionnaire also showed consistent results, indicating better impression, warmth, relaxation, remission, nostalgic feeling for wooden tableware than porcelain-metal tableware. The use of wooden tableware may reduce sympathetic tone at the workplace social gathering compared to porcelain-metal tableware.</em>

Autonomic communication system based on cognitive techniques

Autonomic communication system based on cognitive techniques

Autonomic Communications in Software-Driven Networks

Autonomic communications aim to provide the quality-of-service in networks using self-management mechanisms. It inherits many characteristics from autonomic computing, in particular, when communication systems are running as specialized applications in software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV)-enabled cloud environments. This paper surveys autonomic computing and communications in the context of software-driven networks, i.e., networks based on SDN/NFV concepts. Autonomic communications create new challenges in terms of security, operations, and business support. We discuss several goals, research challenges, and development issues on self-management mechanisms and architectures in software-driven networks. This paper covers multiple perspectives of autonomic communications in software-driven networks, such as automatic testing, integration, and deployment of network functions. We also focus on self-management and optimization, which make use of machine learning techniques.

EROL GELENBE: A CAREER IN MULTI-DISCIPLINARY PROBABILITY MODELS

We focus on Erol Gelenbe's scientific and technical contributions to probability models in the computer and information sciences, but limit our survey to the last fifteen years. We start with a brief overview of his work as a single author, as well as his work in collaboration with over 200 co-authors. We discuss some of his recent and innovative work regarding a new probability model that represents Intermittent Energy Sources for Computing and Communications, introducingEnergy Packet Networkswhich are a probabilistic representation of the flow, storage and consumption of electrical energy at the microscopic level (in electronic chips), and at the macroscopic level (e.g. in buildings or data centers) and for its routing and dynamic usage by consuming units (such as computer elements, chips or machines). We next discuss his work on designing computer and communication systems that parsimoniously use energy in order to achieve a satisfactory level of quality of service (QoS). Trade-offs between system QoS and energy consumption are also considered. Then we turn to Prof. Gelenbe's pioneering work on Autonomic Communications and the design and implementation of CPN, the Cognitive Packet Network, and we also briefly review his spiking random neural network that was used in CPN. This is followed by a brief review of work that he conducted since 1999 on human evacuation from dangerous or catastrophic environments, and the design of technology driven Emergency Management Systems. His research since the late 2000s on Gene Regulatory Networks is then covered together with its application to the detecting possible disease from microarray data. Finally, we briefly discuss some novel analytical models that he developed in this period with publications appearing in journals of physics and applied mathematics.

Context-aware wireless mobile autonomic computing and communications: research trends and emerging applications

Growing attention has recently been devoted to context-aware computing and communication systems, in particular concerning their evolution toward the new paradigm of context-aware autonomic computing and communications. Indeed, context awareness and autonomicity appear to be the indispensable glue technologies to accomplish efficient integration of modern software-intensive cyber-physical systems, operating in open and non-deterministic environments, and to master their complexity. This article provides an update on the latest developments in this field. Proposed methodologies and techniques are discussed and framed in the overall research problem. Moreover, future trends and research challenges are outlined by relating the basic concepts of context-aware autonomic computing and communications to the emerging paradigm of the self-aware Internet of Things, applications of which appear to be very promising examples of next-generation computing and communication systems.

2014 베니스 비엔날레 건축전에 나타난 환유적 리얼리즘

2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture, presented by general director Rem Koolhaas, has shown the distinct difference between his present displays and past displays. Under the theme of FUNDAMENTALS and ABSORBING MODERNITY, Rem Koolhaas has developed his own unique way which is a research-oriented display technique to explain the difference at the exhibition. The purpose of this study is to define a research-oriented display technique as realism rhetoric for the opened dialectic and identify its aspect of a methodic approach. This report investigated not only Rem Koolhaas's thought and theoretical approach through his work but also the comparison of between his present and past displays. His display is based on the constellation of Central Pavilion, National Pavilions, and Arsenale display and reflected the reality of architecture in self-deception through the metonymical interaction of various facts and records. Rem Koolhaas called it the composition of contradiction. In his work, the spatial situation which is the present has been made with the intervention of historical events and has revived the reality of architecture. Also, the present is a montage of the strict control of architecture, the isolation from the architecture itself, and the autonomic communication with other fields. Finally, as a result of his work, Rem Koolhaas has shown that his display is not the end of phase but a phase of creation.

Guest Editorial: Ubiquitous Multimedia Systems and Applications

The technologies of computing and communications have undergone a series of evolutionary innovation over the past decades and improved the quality of human life significantly. Ubiquitous computing and communications is a revolutionary paradigm that aims to provide pervasive and reliable computing solutions and communication services anytime and anywhere. This emerging technology is built upon the rapid research and development advances in a wide range of key areas including wireless and sensor networks, mobile and distributed computing, embedded systems, agent technologies, autonomic communication and information security. Ubiquitous computing and communications has drawn significant interests from both academia and industry and continues to attract tremendous research efforts due to its promising new business opportunity in information technology and engineering. This special issue is devoted to papers addressing research challenges and advances towards the design, implementation and evaluation of ubiquitous multimedia computing and communications technologies, systems and applications. This special issue contains six papers, which are briefly introduced as follows. Exposure fusion is an efficient way for producing high-quality images for common low dynamic range (LDR) output devices from multiple differently exposed LDR images of the same scene, which has significant potential to be applied in the ubiquitous multimedia area. In the paper entitled BA Novel Method for Fusion of Differently Exposed Images Based on Spatial Distribution of Intensity for Ubiquitous Multimedia^ (10.1007/s11042-013-1660-0), Multimed Tools Appl (2015) 74:2743–2744 DOI 10.1007/s11042-015-2458-z

Distributed Networking in Autonomic Solar Powered Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in solar harvesting technologies pave the way for sustainable environmental-monitoring applications in the emerging solar powered wireless sensor networks (SP-WSNs). The complexities associated with the low-resourced, highly-dynamic, and vulnerable sensor nodes operating in potentially unattended or hostile environments require a high degree of self-management and automation. Guided by autonomic communication principles, this paper presents AutoSP-WSN, a novel distributed framework to achieve sustainable data collection while also optimizing end-to-end network performance for SP-WSNs. Initially, we present the energy-aware support component that provides reliable energy monitoring and prediction. This drives the power management component, which is adaptive to time-varying solar power, avoiding battery exhaustion as well as maximizing the per-node utility. Finally, to demonstrate the key design issues of the network protocol component, we propose two self-adaptive network protocols, a routing protocol SP-BCP and a rate control scheme PEA-DLEX. We show that the individual components seamlessly highly integrate as a whole, and the AutoSP-WSN framework exhibits the properties of context-awareness, distributed operation, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-protection and self-healing. Through extensive experiments on a real SP-WSN platform, and hardware-driven simulations, we show that the proposed schemes achieve substantial improvements over previous work, in terms of reliability, sustainable operation, and network utility.

Emerging technologies in communications

This JSAC special issue is covering four emerging areas in communications: Area 1 - e-Health; Area 2 - Peer-to-Peer Networking; Area 3 - Vehicular Networks and Telematics Applications; and Area 4 - Social Networks. This is the first issue of a brand new series in JSAC focusing on Emerging Technologies in Communications. These emerging technical areas were selected from ComSoc's Technical Committees and Technical Sub-Committees. (The second issue will be published later in 2013 on the following areas: Area 5 - Applications of Nanotechnologies in Communications; Area 6 - Autonomic Communications; Area 7 - Fiber Wireless Integration; and Area 8 - Nanoscale and Molecular Networking.) The papers selected are briefly summarized. For this issue, 55 regular papers were selected for publication out of 197 open-call submissions. Also included are three overview (invited) papers. It is devoted to reporting on cutting-edge research achievements covering the following four emerging technical areas in communications.

Network protection codes: Providing self-healing in autonomic networks using network coding

Agile recovery from link failures in autonomic communication networks is essential to increase robustness, accessibility, and reliability of data transmission. However, this must be done with the least amount of protection resources, while using simple management plane functionalities. Recently, network coding has been proposed as a solution to provide agile and cost efficient self-healing against link failures, in a manner that does not require data rerouting, packet retransmission, or failure localization, hence leading to simple control and management planes. To achieve this, separate paths have to be provisioned to carry encoded packets, hence requiring either the addition of extra links, or reserving some of the resources for this purpose. In this paper we introduce self-healing strategies for autonomic networks in order to protect against link failures. The strategies are based on network coding and reduced capacity, which is a technique that we call network protection codes (NPC). In these strategies, an autonomic network is able to provide self-healing from various network failures affecting network operation. Also, network protection codes are extended to provide self-healing from multiple link failures in autonomic networks. Although this leads to reducing the network capacity, the network capacity reduction is asymptotically small in most cases of practical interest. We provide implementation aspects of the proposed strategies, derive bounds and show how to construct network protection code. The paper also develops an Integer Linear Program formulation to evaluate the cost of provisioning connections using the proposed strategies, and uses results from this formulation to show that it is more resource efficient than 1 + 1 protection. A simulation study to evaluate the recovery times, and the buffering requirements due to network coding is also conducted using the OPNET simulator.

An adaptive and predictive approach for autonomic multirate multicast networks

Autonomic communications aim at easing the burden of managing complex and dynamic networks, and designing adaptive, self-turning and self-stabilizing networks to provide much needed flexibility and functional scalability. With the ever-increasing number of multicast applications made recently, considerable efforts have been focused on the design of adaptive flow control schemes for autonomic multicast services. The main difficulties in designing an adaptive flow controller for autonomic multicast service are caused by heterogeneous multicast receivers, especially those with large propagation delays, since the feedback arriving at the source is somewhat outdated and can be harmful to the control operations. To tackle the preceding problem, this article describes a novel, adaptive, and autonomic multicast scheme, the so-called Proportional, Integrative, Derivative plus Neural Network (PIDNN) predictive technique, which consists of two components: the Proportional Integrative plus Derivative (PID) controller and the Back Propagation BP Neural Network (BPNN). In this integrated scheme, the PID controllers are located at the next upstream main branch nodes of the multicast receivers, and have explicit rate algorithms to regulate the receiving rates of the receivers; while the BPNN is located at the multicast source, and predicts the available bandwidth of those longer delay receivers to compute the expected rates of the longer delay receivers. The ultimate sending rate of the multicast source is the maximum of the aforesaid receiving rates that can be accommodated by its participating branches. This network-assisted property is different from the existing control schemes, in that the PIDNN controller can release the irresponsiveness of a multicast flow caused by those long propagation delays from the receivers. By using BPNN, this active scheme makes the control more responsive to the receivers with longer propagation delay. Thus the rate adaptation can be performed in a timely manner, for the sender to respond to network congestion quickly. We analyze the theoretical aspects of the proposed algorithm, show how the control mechanism can be used to design a controller to support multirate multicast transmission based on feedback of explicit rates, and verify this matching using simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PIDNN controller avoids overflow of multicast traffic, and performs better than the existing scheme PNN [Tan et al. 2005] and the multicast schemes based on control theory. Moreover, it also performs well in the sense that it achieves high link utilization, quick response, good scalability, high unitary throughput, intra-session fairness and inter-session fairness.

How Evolving Network Access and Network Management Technologies are Redefining the Competitive Wireless Markets

This paper examines some of the key problems users encounter when accessing current generation wireless networks. Using a case study of a hypothetical user, the authors explore the emerging services and the new broadband wireless network technologies necessary to carry them out. This paper analyses the issues associated with an observed trend in the industry that exposes potential changes to the long-term, rigid commercial relation between wireless providers and users: as a result of a range of evolved broadband wireless access standards and technologies, autonomic communications and policy-based management, and new pricing schemes, consumers will likely face new opportunities to enter short-term and spot contracts with the new wireless providers. This new landscape also allow multiple competing Access Providers (APs) to dynamically assign prices, and poses new and interesting challenges to the regulatory function. The paper also discusses a framework for the integration of heterogeneous technologies and management policies based on the network context that make up this emerging, hybrid wireless landscape, and describes the economic characteristics of new markets likely to arise.

Technology and market conditions toward a new competitive landscape in the wireless access market

This article argues that the wireless telecommunication market is about to witness a shift in business models and market structure as a result of the deployment of new broadband access technologies, spectrum management techniques, policy-based network management, and the drive of new entrants to compete against the incumbents. The article discusses four agents of evolutionary changes: a range of broadband wireless access standards and technologies that are front-runners in the industry's efforts to embody the next generation of wireless networks; new provider-customer relationships facilitated through changes in the usual contract patterns that will allow consumers to enter short-term and spot contracts with the new wireless providers; an overview of the current debate on spectrum management; and an explanation of how autonomic communications and policy-based management would support the new structure. Finally, the article asserts the necessity for the integration of the heterogeneous technologies that make up this emerging, hybrid wireless landscape, and describes the economic characteristics of a new competitive scenario.

Recent advances in autonomic communications [Guest Editorial

The nine papers in this special issue focus on recent advances in autonomic communications. This issue addresses four areas in which autonomics play a central role: network architectures, traffic management, monitoring, and resource management.

The autonomic network architecture (ANA)

The objective of autonomic networking is to enable the autonomous formation and parametrization of nodes and networks by letting protocols sense and adapt to the networking environment at run time. Besides its dynamic aspects, a core requirement of autonomic networking is to define a structured framework and execution environment that enables algorithms to operate in a continously changing environment. This paper presents the major design principles of the Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) and reports on a first implementation. The guiding principle of ANA is to strive for flexibility and genericity at all levels of the architecture. In our approach we explicitly avoid to impose a one-size-fits-all architecture (where communication protocols and paradigms are fixed by the architecture). To this end, ANA introduces generic abstractions, for example information dispatch points instead of addressable endpoints, as well as communication primitives that support network heterogeneity, adaptability, and evolution. These core abstractions allow for the coexistance of multiple and diverse networking styles and protocols. With the public release of the ANA prototype, we aim at federating autonomics related networking projects, enabling different actors to share, compare, and build upon each other?s work. The ANA runtime can host clean slate network designs as well as legacy Internet technology and serves as a platform for demonstrating autonomic communication principles.

Event detection and correlation for network environments

Autonomic communication has the aim of supporting fast-evolving network technologies and services, and of reducing the burden in managing complex and dynamic network environments. Networks with desirable self- properties should be more adaptable to changing conditions and would enable greater flexibility and functional scalability. A necessary condition for realising these benefits is a heightened level of network awareness; this requires not merely the capacity to monitor the system and network state, but also the ability to characterise the operational environment and its dynamic shifts. As argued in the literature, patterns of change can be detected through cross-correlation of monitored or sensory inputs expressed in events. The profiling of the temporal ordering and other relationships encoded in these patterns can provide contextual information suitable for reasoning and adaptation tasks. In this paper, we present the design framework and initial evaluation of an Information Sensing system that aims to enable awareness through an integrated event detection-correlation mechanism. In the context of autonomic networks, it offers a more lightweight solution than traditional active database-oriented event systems, and it has better performance than log-post analysis processing; its design also provides for a distributed detection facility.

Enabling routing control in a DHT

DHTs are scalable, self-organizing, and adaptive to underlying topology changes, thus being a promising infrastructure for realizing autonomic communications in distributed systems. To provide the above advantages, however, DHTs sacrifice flexibility, that is, all messages are routed by using a common algorithm in a DHT on the assumption that all participant nodes are homogeneous. In practice, nodes in large-scale systems might be heterogeneous with respect to their capabilities, reputations, affiliations of administrative domains, and so on, which consequently makes it preferable to distinguish the heterogeneity of participant nodes and enable flexible control of routing destinations and paths. To achieve this, in this paper we propose a novel approach that supports organizing nodes into groups and enables routing control in a DHT. The effectiveness of our proposals is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations.