Study of the Applicability of Model-Driven Metodologies for the Design of Autonomic Behaviours

Verkonhallinta on tällä hetkellä monimutkaista ja vaatii korkeat kustannukset. Näin ollen verkkoteollisuus tarvitsee verkonhallinnan alueelle muutoksen, joka vähentää näitä kahta aspektia. Ratkaisu perustuu siihen, että osa hallintatoiminnoista, jotka tarvitsevat ihmisen puuttumista, siirretään itse verkkoon, luoden autonomisia verkkoja. EFIPSANS on projekti, joka tähtää IPv6:n ja siihen liittyvien protokollien ominaisuuksien hyödyntämiseen ja laajentamiseen, jotta IPv6-pohjaisten autonomisten ja itseohjautuvien verkkojen ja palvelujen realisointi olisi mahdollista. EFIPSANS:n kehittämät itseohjautuvuuden ominaisuudet tunnetaan Autonomisina Käyttäytymisinä, jotka toteutetaan järjestelmässä, kuten reitittimessä, tai kokonaisen verkon muodostamassa järjestelmässä, kontrollointisilmukoiden avulla. Projektissa suunniteltu arkkitehtuuri Autonomisten Käyttäytymisten suunnitteluun ja toteuttamiseen kutsutaan Yleiseksi Autonomiseksi Verkkoarkkitehtuuriksi (GANA). Diplomityön tavoitteena on edistää Malliperusteisen Metodologian ja siihen liittyvän Työkaluketjun kehittämistä, jota voidaan soveltaa Autonomisten Käyttäytymisten suunnitteluun, simulointiin, todentamiseen ja hyväksymiseen. Tämä diplomityö alkaa johdannolla EFIPSANS projektiin, pääpainonaan eri autonomiset käyttäytymiset, kuin myös GANA referenssimalli. Sen jälkeen käsittelemme Malliperusteista Metodologiaa sekä useista erityyppisistä työkaluista koostuvan Työkaluketjun toteutuksen yksityiskohtia. Lopulta käsittelemme toteutetun Työkaluketjun etuja ja rajoituksia.The complexity and costs needed for network management are currently very high, thus the networking industry is calling for a change in the network management area that would reduce these two aspects. The solution is based on moving some of the management tasks that involve human intervention into the network itself, creating autonomic networks. EFIPSANS is a project that aims at exploiting and extending the features of IPv6 and related protocols to enable the realization of IPv6-based autonomic and self-managing networks and services. The self-management features that EFIPSANS has developed are known as Autonomic Behaviours, which are realized by control-loops within a system e.g. a router or within the overall network as a system. The architecture developed within the project for designing and engineering Autonomic Behaviours is Generic Autonomic Network Architecture (GANA). The goal of this Master's Thesis is to contribute to the development of a Model-Driven Methodology and an associated Tool-Chain that can be applied for the design, simulation, verification and validation of Autonomic Behaviours. In this thesis, first, we give an overview on the EFIPSANS project, focusing on the different Autonomic Behaviours, as well as on the GANA reference model. Then, we discuss the identified Model-Driven Methodology and the implementation details of the Tool-Chain, which is orchestrated by several tools of different natures. Then, we show a step-by-step case study using the developed Tool-Chain. Finally, we discuss the benefits and the limitations of the implemented Tool-Chain

IPv6 in Wireless Networks – Selected Issues, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2011, nr 2

The article presents issues concerning the construction of autonomous wireless networks based on the IPv6 protocol. Prospects of implementation of IPv6 in wireless networks and IPv6 features and mechanisms important in such applications are discussed. Research directions related to the use of IPv6 in wireless networks are also outlined. Then the selected concepts are described, arising in the course of the EFIPSANS (Exposing the Features in IP Version Six Protocols that can be Exploited/Extended for the Purposes of Designing/Building Autonomic Networks and Services) project, during studies on the autonomy of nodes and routing configuration for wireless networks. Concepts presented here apply to wireless ad hoc mesh networks. Discussed is their nature and aspects related to auto-configuration and autonomously operating routing. In particular, there is a Wireless Autonomic Routing Framework (WARF) architecture presented

A little less interaction, a little more action: A modular framework for network troubleshooting

An ideal network troubleshooting system would be an almost fully automated system, monitoring the whole network at once, feeding the results to a knowledge-based decision making system that suggests actions to the operator or corrects the failure automatically. Reality is quite the contrary: operators separated in their offices try to track down complex networking failures in their own way, which is generally a long sequence of manually edited parallel shell commands (mostly ping, traceroute, route, iperf, ofctl etc.). This process requires operators to be "masters of complexity" (which they often are) and continuous interaction. In this paper we aim at narrowing this huge gap between vision and reality by introducing a modular framework capable of (i) formalizing troubleshooting processes as the concatenation of executable functions [called Troubleshooting Graphs (TSGs)], (ii) executing these graphs via an interpreter, (iii) evaluating and navigating between the outputs of the functions and (iv) sharing troubleshooting know-hows in a formalized manner.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2011, nr 2

kwartalni

NEURON: Enabling Autonomicity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Future Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) will be ubiquitous, large-scale networks interconnected with the existing IP infrastructure. Autonomic functionalities have to be designed in order to reduce the complexity of their operation and management, and support the dissemination of knowledge within a WSN. In this paper a novel protocol for energy efficient deployment, clustering and routing in WSNs is proposed that focuses on the incorporation of autonomic functionalities in the existing approaches. The design of the protocol facilitates the design of innovative applications and services that are based on overlay topologies created through cooperation among the sensor nodes

Service Group Management facilitated by DSL driven Policies in embedded Middleware

Middleware by its very nature is fundamental to the functioning of systems as it provides the communication between software components. It is very much an underlying technology and is rarely visible to end users. As systems develop, certain domain semantics, provided by the domain experts, need to be injected into the behaviour of the underlying middleware, but in a controlled manner. The methods used to achieve this are often static in nature, wholly dependent on how they are implemented, deployed and managed. An increasingly popular way to manage this behaviour injection is through the use of policies, a technique used to govern defined rules, triggered by associated events, resulting in specific actions when certain conditions are encountered. Strong efforts have been made throughout the evolution of software development methods and programming languages to solve the lack of dynamicity which can arise through poor practices. Successive language based attempts to attain a higher level of abstraction in the notations used and techniques deployed have resulted in the re-discovery of Domain Specific Languages (DSL). This paper looks at injecting the dynamicity required in the management of service groups through a policy based DSL

Programming Abstractions for Software–Defined Wireless Networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has received, in the last years, significant interest from the academic and the industrial communities alike. The decoupled control and data planes found in an SDN allows for logically centralized intelligence in the control plane and generalized network hardware in the data plane. Although the current SDN ecosystem provides a rich support for wired packet-switched networks, the same cannot be said for wireless networks where specific radio data-plane abstractions, controllers, and programming primitives are still yet to be established. In this work, we present a set of programming abstractions modeling the fundamental aspects of a wireless network, namely state management, resource provisioning, network monitoring, and network reconfiguration. The proposed abstractions hide away the implementation details of the underlying wireless technology providing programmers with expressive tools to control the state of the network. We also present a Software-Defined Radio Access Network Controller for Enterprise WLANs and a Python--based Software Development Kit implementing the proposed abstractions. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the usefulness, efficiency and flexibility of the platform over a real 802.11-based WLAN