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.

A majority of network architectures aim at solving specific shortcomings of the original Internet architecture. While providing solutions for the particular problems, they often lack in flexibility and do not provide general concepts for future networking requirements. In contrast, we introduce a network architecture that aims to be versatile enough to serve as a foundation for the future Internet. The main pillars of our architecture are communication pivots called information dispatch points (IDPs) which embed the concept of modularity at all levels of the architecture. IDPs completely decouple functional entities by means of indirection thus enabling evolving protocol stacks. Our architecture also provides a consistent application programming interface (API) to access node-local or network-wide functionality. In addition to the description of this architecture, we report about a working prototype of the architecture and we give examples of its application.

The ANA (Autonomic Network Architecture) project aims at providing a framework to flexibly host, interconnect, and federate multiple heterogeneous networks in an autonomic way, i.e. without requiring active human intervention. The guiding design principle is to strive for a maximum degree of flexibility at all levels of the architecture in order to inherently support heterogeneity and evolution. This paper describes the core abstractions and concepts of ANA (as defined during the first year of the project) and introduces their basic operation and interaction. While not autonomic themselves, the core architectural principles of ANA will enable autonomicity by not imposing a "one-size-fits-all" approach where protocols and paradigms are fixed by the architecture. We indeed argue that only the capacity of the network to be polyfunctional and fully adaptable will justify the label ' autonomic'. A prototype ofANA is currently being developed and will be released in 2008: the goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomic networking within the 4 years of the project.

In this paper we propose a self-configuring framework for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our architecture is based on the degenerated use of network address translation (NAT) where each node locally builds its "private address map", i.e. its own view of the addressing plan of the entire MANET. In contrast to previous schemes, MANET nodes do not need to coordinate in order to generate unique (IP) addresses.

In ad hoc networks (MANETs), wireless nodes spontaneously collaborate to route packets among a multi-hop and versatile topology. While such networks have originaly been considered as autarkical systems, it becomes clear that there is a growing interest in connecting them to the Internet. In such a hybrid ad hoc network, one or more nodes act as gateways to the outside world. This situation requires the use of a global addressing scheme in order to allow end-to-end communications between MANET nodes and correspondents in the Internet. In this paper, we present and evaluate an IPv6 address autoconfiguration protocol based on the original concept of prefix continuity. This feature ensures that there exists, between a node N and its gateway G, a path of nodes such that all nodes on this path use the same IPv6 prefix than N and G. As a result, all the nodes of a given sub-network form a logical tree rooted at the sub- network's gateway, and in which all nodes share an identical IPv6 prefix. In a multiple-gateways and multiple-prefixes environment, our protocol proactively and dynamically reacts to topological changes in order to maintain the prefix continuity of each sub- network.

The recent and increasing popularity of wireless transmission systems has initiated a strong interest in research on mobile communications. While most of this research effort focuses on unicast communications, there has also been a number of proposals to support multicasting with mobile members. However, the majority of these proposals, despite being innovative and elegant, remain at a research level, i.e. it is not clear if they could realistically be deployed in real large networks. In contrast, the IETF mobile IP working group has outlined two realistic methods that allow mobile nodes to join multicast groups. These proposals have however never been evaluated and compared. This paper therefore presents the results of a large number of simulations in which we have compared the efficiency of the two IETF solutions. We also propose the use of a new extension of the multicast listener delivery (MLD) protocol, which allows to rapidly resume the delivery of multicast data to a mobile receiver that has just performed a handover. The efficiency of this proposal is also compared with the already mentioned solutions of the IETF.

The paper proposes an original wavelength-division multiplexing slotted-ring network architecture with nodes that use one fixed transmitter and fixed receivers. It is shown, through theoretical predictions and simulation results, how a simple slotted medium access control protocol can be implemented to achieve fairness between access nodes and efficient bandwidth utilization when used in a metropolitan access network. Performance for both source and destination stripping schemes has been analytically derived and simulated with a realistic self-similar traffic model. A modified node architecture using a tunable receiver has also been considered and the impact of receiver collisions has been evaluated and analyzed. Finally, the effect of using unbalanced traffic sources has also been analyzed and simulated.

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), the IPv6 version of Mobile IP which is currently being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is a protocol that describes how a mobile node can change its point of attachment to the Internet. While MIPv6 focuses on unicast communications, it also proposes two basic methods, known as bi-directional tunneling and remote subscription, to handle multicast communications with mobile nodes. In the mean time, the deployment of Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) is of great consideration, mainly for scalability reasons as it is a strong candidate that could be used to support inter-domain multicast routing. In the particular case of mobile IPv6 SSM sources, the mechanisms proposed in MIPv6 to support multicast communications introduce a number of problems that strongly degrade the SSM routing mode of operation. The intend of this document is to describe protocol enhancements that can be used to solve the problems introduced by mobile SSM sources when used with the current version of MIPv6. The extensions, mechanisms and mode of operation of the protocol proposed in this paper are denoted as MSSMSv6 (Mobile SSM Sources for IPv6).

This article proposes a WDM slotted-ring network architecture. Used as a metropolitan access network, it is shown through theoretical predictions and simulation results how a simple MAC protocol can be implemented to achieve fairness between access nodes and efficient bandwidth utilization. In the paper it is shown that the MAC protocol efficiency grows with the number of nodes in the network - a very attractive feature in the metropolitan market. Simple theoretical equations allow for easy provisioning of the network size and scalability. These were validated by discrete-event simulations using realistic traffic sources. The original set of simulation results using a source-stripping scheme are then compared with an improved implementation where destination-stripping is used. Finally, the impact of receiver collision is studied and a solution to this problem is presented.

This article considers a WDM slotted-ring network architecture. Used as a metropolitan access network, it is shown through simulation results how a simple MAC protocol can be implemented to achieve fairness between access nodes. Excellent queuing delay and packet dropping probability results are obtained assuming that a maximum load threshold is not exceeded. Further developments are proposed to improve the efficiency, introduce congestion avoidance mechanisms and add QoS capabilities by implementing intelligence within the network access nodes.