Towards Consistency of Policy States in Decentralized Autonomic Network Management

Autonomic network management is a vision that brings autonomic computing principles to network management. In this vision, the use of policies is a key aspect. Besides, it is necessary some level of decentralization to enable broad autonomic capabilities. However, the consistency of policy states among autonomic management elements is an important challenge. In this paper we introduce multi-agent truth maintenance features in decentralized autonomic network management as a mechanism to bring consistency maintenance of policy states. We developed a model of a decentralized autonomic network management system on Peersim to perform simulation experiments. Besides, the utilization of policies in P2P-based autonomic network management systems is presented as case study.