Federation, a matter of autonomic management in the Future Internet

In the Future Internet, free exchange of information between enterprise applications and networking systems promotes the personalization of services and enables many different types of end-user applications and management operations optimizing the network performance. As result of this free information exchange, we need to facilitate the federation of information between these applications, harmonizing the differences between operation, management data and information models in heterogeneous networks, and application management systems. This paper concentrates on identifying the research challenges that we have to address in the areas of software engineering and network management supporting federation. In particular, we describe research challenges for federated management systems highlighting the flexibility these systems can offer in the Future Internet communications, when they are able to support value-added federated end-to-end services. As part of our approach, semantic techniques are cited to represent networking information governing technology and/or network protocols offering a wide diversity of end-to-end services as a result of this transparent information sharing process.