DISco: A distributed information store for network challenges and their outcome

We present the design of DISco, a storage and communication middleware that enables distributed and task-centric autonomic control of networks. DISco allows multi-agent identification of anomalous situations (challenges) and assists coordinated remediation that will maintain service at an acceptable level, although degraded. The history of agents decisions, their context and outcomes is tracked as the situation evolves, and information is automatically gathered and organised to ease further human-assisted diagnosis. We then explore the feasibility of using state of the art peer-to-peer publish/subscribe and storage systems as building blocks for this service. The ability of those systems to support range queries and aggregation will be a key factor for their suitability to the task.