Autonomic Software Release Management for Communications Networks

Software release management is the process of determining, acquiring, releasing and deploying changes into an information technology (IT) environment. The process has often been manual to a certain extent. However, the process can become quite complicated and unmanageable for communications networks, where the managed service providers may need to serve and upgrade multiple customers, environments, networks, devices and components - in parallel. An important design goal of such a process is to have a distributed, integrated and self-managed system that can continuously monitor the networks and devices, detect and determine the exceptions, locate and retrieve the upgrades from their respective sources, release and deploy the upgrades in the affected environment; all in a timely and a non-disruptive manner. This paper introduces the problem of software release management for communications networks, proposes an agent model and a novel protocol for autonomic software release management, and discusses a prototype autonomic software release management system that can be effectively used by the service providers to upgrade and maintain their customers' networks.