Self-Management Capacities in Future Internet Wireless Systems

Thanks to exponential growth rates, the Internet has doubled in size many times since its inception, nearly five decades ago. However, this tremendous growth has brought on an accumulating complexity in management tasks, thus undercutting the Internet's manageability and proving detrimental to further development. To address this predicament, the concept of a capacity for autonomic operation was proposed and later extended with artificial intelligence features to thus converge on the vision of a self-managed future Internet. The capacity for self-management builds on specific technological enablers, including a network monitoring infrastructure, mechanisms for decision making and decision appraisal as well as advanced artificial intelligence features (e.g., machine learning). This paper establishes the role of these capacities in realizing a self-managed mode of operation for wireless Internet systems. We present a case study where self-management features resulting from the combined application of device and network monitoring and decision making are employed in a solution of a well-known planning and management problem in wireless networking.