CONEMAF: A MODULAR MULTI AGENT FRAMEWORK FOR AUTONOMIC NETWORK MANAGEMENT

摘要

Communication networks are growing both in terms of size and complexity. Because of the huge amount of monitored data to analyse and correlate, the management task that relies mostly on human operators is becoming time-consuming, labour-intensive and costly. The centralized management paradigm adopted by current management systems is no longer suitable for such networks. A distributed management with more autonomy delegated to network devices is therefore paramount to master this complexity efficiently. Multiagent systems characteristics fit the requirements that must be taken into account to integrate autonomicity in networks. This paper presents CONEMAF, a novel modular multi-agent platform for autonomic network management. CONEMAF is fully distributed, allows situated knowledge analysis and implements a cognitive cycle for autonomic management. Implemented on top of OSGi, the present release makes use of well-proven Java-based COTS. CONEMAF has been deployed on Linux routers and is demonstrated for autonomic routing in a wireless mesh network.