Standardization of resilience & survivability, and autonomic fault-management, in evolving and future networks: An ongoing initiative recently launched in ETSI

Resilience and Survivability in networks is an area which is growing fast, mainly due to the fact that these vital desired properties for a network, protocol, application, or service behaviour, are now receiving a lot of attention from industry, research, academia, and standardization groups-thanks to the emergence of autonomic & cognitive management and control paradigms for the evolving networks in recent years. In characterizing the resilience properties of a system or individual functional entities of a system, the area of autonomics is extending the traditional scope and meaning of resilience in networks, by including self-diagnosing and self-repairing/self-healing behaviours, as well as proactive resilience to various types of challenges i.e. adverse conditions of operation and incidents (including fault-activations and security attacks and threats). This goes beyond the protection and restoration techniques for survivable networks found in protocols such as SDH, ATM, and IP-Fast-Re-route. What is becoming crucial for the global community is the establishment of standardized frameworks that can be applied for implementing interoperable systems that exhibit resilience properties in their own capacity and collaboratively as networked systems. This paper reports on a recently launched initiative in ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) that is aimed at standardizing resilience, survivability, autonomic fault-management and autonomic security management. We outline the types of concepts and architectural principles that are standardizable from resilience, survivability, and autonomic fault and security management point of view. We present and discuss a candidate evolvable architectural framework for standardization that unifies resilience, survivability and autonomic fault-management within a single holistic framework. It unifies the aspects by defining the responsible Functional Blocks (FBs) and their interworking in the realization of resilience, survivability, autonomic fault-management and autonomic security management in systems and networks. We show how research results in these areas can now be contributed to developing and relying on a commonly-shared (i.e. common baseline) unified standardized framework, by adopting, enhancing and evolving the framework presented in this paper as standardization activity (open to all technical experts/researchers to now join).