With the advances in middleware and Web services technologies, network sendees are evolving from simple client-sender applications to self-configuring services that can compose primitive components distributed in the Internet into a value-added service configuration that provides rich functionalities to users. A resulting research problem is how to continuously adapt such composite service configurations at run time in order to cope with the increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous network environments and computing platforms. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptation architecture that allows service developers to specify their service-specific adaptation knowledge as "externalized" adaptation strategies. These adaptation strategies are used by a general, shared adaptation framework to perform run-time adaptation operations that automatically incorporate service-specific knowledge. In addition to the strategies, we also identify another aspect of adaptation knowledge that is not addressed by previous solutions: adaptation coordination. Our framework provides integrated support for the specification and execution of both aspects of developers' adaptation knowledge.

A common approach to adding self-management capabilities to a system is to provide one or more external control modules, whose responsibility is to monitor system behavior, and adapt the system at run time to achieve various goals (configure the system, improve performance, recover from faults, etc.). An important problem arises when there is more than one such self-management module: how can one make sure that they are composed to provide consistent and complementary benefits? In this paper we describe a solution that introduces a self-management coordination architecture and infrastructure to support such composition. We focus on the problem of coordinating self-configuring and self-healing capabilities, particularly with respect to global configuration and incremental repair. We illustrate the approach in the context of a self-managing video teleconference system that composes two preexisting adaptation modules to achieve synergistic benefits of both.

A network that provides not only connectivity but also computational resources to application flows will enable a new array of network services. For example, applications that require content adaptation can be deployed more easily in a network that provides integrated communication and computational resources. In this paper, we study the problem of finding a path for a flow that has both computational and bandwidth constraints. We present a distributed load-resistive routing algorithm that generates precomputed routing information and optimizes the routing decisions for both applications and computational and communication resource providers. We show through simulations that our distributed approach performs comparably to a centralized algorithm and is more resilient to longer routing update intervals.