Composition of Well-known Metrics to Characterize Autonomic Networks

Development in the field of autonomic networking represents a great potential for the evolution of current Internet to a highly manageable future Internet. However, today, autonomic systems are largely heterogeneous and lack of standard metrics definition to evaluate properly their level of autonomy, performance, and impact on the network. The main goal of this paper is thus to define metrics and adequate measurement techniques to characterize autonomic systems for the future Internet. In this paper, we present the main basic metrics for the current Internet and also present traditional performance measurement techniques. We define a methodology to build new composite metrics based on the basic metrics. Finally, we propose some composite metrics and give an example following our methodology to build a specific autonomic metric, the system stability.