Roadmap for real deployment of network autonomic features

A fundamental problem of today's networks is the ever-increasing complexity of their operation. This complexity is mainly driven by the heterogeneity and incremental nature of technologies at play. Furthermore, network operations are typically human driven and thus timeconsuming, expensive, and error-prone. Complexity and cost are becoming important limiting factors to the evolution of networks and to the enriched services they are expected to deliver. In response, autonomic networking aims to provide a scalable and trustworthy operational environment while mastering complexity. Distributed control, self-organization and knowledge sharing are the key characteristics to build collaborative processes that pursue high level objectives specified by the operator in order to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) via the reduction of human effort and mistakes, and via the optimization of resources. Since Clark introduced the idea of "A knowledge plane for the Internet" [5] the research community has started working towards making the paradigms of autonomic networking become reality. The final objective being to enable internet service providers (ISP) and network operators to achieve the desired levels of dynamicity, efficiency and scalability so as to manage current and future networks that are ever more pervasive and sophisticated. Since the birth of the autonomic networking concept, none of the many research proposals has succeeded to convince the vendors and operators of their deployability.