Written by leading scientists and researchers, this book presents a comprehensive reference of state-of-the-art efforts and early results in the area of autonomic networking and communication. This special issue explores different ways that autonomic principles can be applied to existing and future networks. In particular, the book has three main parts, each of them represented by three papers discussing them from industrial and academic perspectives.

New paradigms for communication/networking systems are needed in order to tackle the emerging issues such as heterogeneity, complexity and management of evolvable infrastructures. In order to realize such advanced systems, approaches should become task- and knowledge-driven, enabling a service-oriented, requirement, and trust-driven development of communication networks. The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies and devices in a dynamically changing environment poses many challenges to the research community, including interoperability, programmability, management, openness, reliability, performance, context awareness, intelligence, autonomy, security, privacy, safety, and semantics. This edited volume explores the challenges of technologies to realize the vision where devices and applications seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate, and autonomously manage themselves, and as a result, the borders of virtual and real world vanish or become significantly blurred.

Autonomic Computing and Networking presents introductory and advanced topics on autonomic computing and networking with emphasis on architectures, protocols, services, privacy & security, simulation and implementation testbeds. Autonomic computing and networking are new computing and networking paradigms that allow the creation of self-managing and self-controlling computing and networking environment using techniques such as distributed algorithms and context-awareness to dynamically control networking functions without human interventions. Autonomic networking is characterized by recovery from failures and malfunctions, agility to changing networking environment, self-optimization and self-awareness. The self-control and management features can help to overcome the growing complexity and heterogeneity of exiting communication networks and systems. The realization of fully autonomic heterogeneous networking introduces several research challenges in all aspects of computing and networking and related fields.

Autonomic networking aims to solve the mounting problems created by increasingly complex networks, by enabling devices and service-providers to decide, preferably without human intervention, what to do at any given moment, and ultimately to create self-managing networks that can interface with each other, adapting their behavior to provide the best service to the end-user in all situations. This book gives both an understanding and an assessment of the principles, methods and architectures in autonomous network management, as well as lessons learned from, the ongoing initiatives in the field. It includes contributions from industry groups at Orange Labs, Motorola, Ericsson, the ANA EU Project and leading universities. These groups all provide chapters examining the international research projects to which they are contributing, such as the EU Autonomic Network Architecture Project and Ambient Networks EU Project, reviewing current developments and demonstrating how autonomic management principles are used to define new architectures, models, protocols, and mechanisms for future network equipment. - Provides reviews of cutting-edge approaches to the management of complex telecommunications, sensors, etc. networks based on new autonomic approaches. This enables engineers to use new autonomic techniques to solve complex distributed problems that are not possible or easy to solve with existing techniques. - Discussion of FOCALE, a semantically rich network architecture for coordinating the behavior of heterogeneous and distributed computing resources. This provides vital information, since the data model holds much of the power in an autonomic system, giving the theory behind the practice, which will enable engineers to create their own solutions to network management problems. - Real case studies from the groups in industry and academia who work with this technology. These allow engineers to see how autonomic networking is implemented in a variety of scenarios, giving them a solid grounding in applications and helping them generate their own solutions to real-world problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International IFIP TC6 Conference on Autonomic Networking, AN 2006. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on autonomic networks, self-configuration, autonomic platform and services, autonomic management and discovery policy-based management, ad hoc, sensor and ambient autonomic networks, and autonomic control of mobile networks.

Autonomic computing and networking (ACN), a concept inspired by the human autonomic system, is a priority research area and a booming new paradigm in the field. Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic Computing and Networking: Specification, Development, and Verification outlines the characteristics, novel approaches of specification, refinement, programming and verification associated with ACN. The goal of ACN and the topics covered in this work include making networks and computers more self-organized, self- configured, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-protecting, and more. This book helpfully details the steps necessary towards realizing computer and network autonomy and its implications.

"Nature-inspired" includes, roughly speaking, "bio-inspired"+"physical-inspired"+"social-inspired"+ and so on. This book contains highly original contributions about how nature is going to shape networking systems of the future. Hence, it focuses on rigorous approaches and cutting-edge solutions, which encompass three classes of major methods: 1) Those that take inspiration from nature for the development of novel problem solving techniques; 2) Those that are based on the use of networks to synthesize natural phenomena; and 3) Those that employ natural materials to compute or communicate.