Section: Application Domains

Autonomous Telecommunications Systems: In-Band Supervision

Participants : Stefan Haar, Serge Haddad.

In the context of traditional hard-wired communication networks, supervision structures for managing faults, configuration, provisioning etc could be developed with a fixed infrastructure, and perform the communication between sensors, supervisors, policy enforcement points etc over a separate network using separate hardware. This rigid, out-of-band technology does not survive passing to today's and tomorrow's services and networks. In fact, the dynamic mobility of services combined across sites and domains cannot be captured unless the network used for supervision evolves in the same way and simultaneously, which rules out static solutions; but providing out-of-band infrastructure that grows with the networks to be supervised would be prohibitively expensive, if at all technically feasible. Heterogeneity is the other feature of modern networks that forces a change, since different domains are not likely to agree on a pervasive third-party supervision. Rather, the providers will keep control over the internal state and evolution of their domain, and accept only exchange through standardized outward interfaces.

Supervision has thus to be re-invented on an in-band, autonomous base: monitoring probes deployed on the web, dysfunctions on one peer node diagnosed by another peer in a network with changing configuration, enhanced supervisor and actor capacities of services, etc. MExICo will work on improving the interoperability of service components through continued application of e.g. distributed techniques for control and diagnosis.