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62898 NOMS 2010 Application Sessions – Federation, A Matter of Autonomic Management in the future Internet

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Federation, a Matter of Autonomic Management in the Future Internet M. Serrano1, S. van der Meer1, V. Holum 2, J. Murphy 2, and J. Strassner 3 1

Waterford Institute of Technology, WIT - TSSG, Waterford, Ireland. 2 University College Dublin, UCD - PEL, Dublin, Ireland. 3 Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, South Korea. 1

{jmserano, vdmeer}@tssg.org; 2 {viliam.holub; john.murphy}@ucd.ie; 3 and [email protected]

Abstract—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. Index Terms—Service Management, Federation, Semantic Modeling and Management, Ontology Engineering, Networking Data and Ontologies, Ontology Matching and Alignment, Ontology Sharing and Reuse, Future Internet

I. INTRODUCTION

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ext generation networks and software applications are becoming every day more service-oriented. Thus service management design compromise research efforts and the work of multidisciplinary research communities to construct servicecentric novel mechanisms in enterprise and communication systems. The objective is to facilitate new services based on the exchange of management information to autonomically govern these new services.

Research on the Future Internet is currently investigating how to improve the network infrastructure addressing serviceoriented social trends and economic commitments and challenges that future communications systems demand in terms of end user requirements, end user control, serviceoriented performance, and networking operations [1]. Recent studies for what benefits a service-oriented Future

Internet design brings has been described in previous works [1][2]. In this paper we study the Future Internet in a serviceoriented manner [3][4], coming through a revision about the federation concept and assumptions in how autonomic management support federation in the Future Internet. In other words the roles that autonomic management operations can play in federated environments are addressed in this paper. In this sense, knowledge engineering, and especially semantic tools that enable it to generate and use formal mechanisms for describing services and their interactions with users and network elements, can lead to a new genre of service-oriented network applications that can understand end user requirement more efficiently [5][6]. These features help to optimize the delivery of value-added business services by enabling the semantics of business needs to be understood by networks, and vice-versa. Knowledge engineering enables a set of high-level of abstraction to formally describe and represent technologies, networking protocols and mechanisms associated with network elements to satisfy enterprise requirements. In the Future Internet, communications systems will need to support a broad range of business models and user interaction behavior with autonomic communication networks [7]. Thus, key concepts in management of the Future Internet, such as the federation, are being considered crucial to achieve with the mentioned complex labor, which are studied and described in this paper. This paper concentrates on providing research challenges that have to be address in the areas of software engineering and network management supporting federated end-to-end services. This paper is organized as follows: Section II presents a set of basic definitions to be considered as crucial in the framework of this research. Section III presents the scientific relationship that must be addressed by knowledge engineering and network management communities behind the novel concept of federated autonomic management of end-to-end communication services. Section IV presents the summary and outlook for federation of management systems. Finally some bibliography references supporting this research are included.


II. BASIS FOR FEDERATION In this paper, the concept of federated, autonomic management of communications services is defined from the perspective of end-to-end services. This envisions network management systems made up of possibly heterogeneous components, each of which has some degree of local autonomy to realize business goals. Such business goals provide services which transcend legal and organizational boundaries in dynamic networks of consumers and providers. We use the following definitions: Federated refers to the ability of such systems to enable network and service management as result of threading negotiations for evolving value chains composed of providers and/or consumers [8]. Autonomic reflects the ability of such systems to be aware of both themselves and their environment, so that they can self-govern their behavior within the constraints of the business goals that they collectively seek to achieve [9][10]. Management refers to the ability of such systems not just to configure, monitor and control a network element or service, but also to optimize the administration of lifecycle aspects of that resource(s) or service(s) in a programmable way. This enables end-users to take a more proactive role in managing their quality of experience [11]. Communication Services refer to the requirement for such systems to focus on services, not networks and network elements. This higher level of abstraction enables business requirements to be met by the network, and emphasizes offering services in a portable manner that is independent of the utilized networks. To effectively deliver and manage endto-end communications services over an interconnected, but heterogeneous, networking infrastructure, a greater degree of coordination and cooperation is required between communication resources, the software that manages them, and the actors who direct such management. A. Federation The term Federation plays an important role in the Future Internet. [3][4][12] are examples where the Future Internet environment consists of heterogeneous administrative domains, each providing a set of different services. In such an environment, there is no single central authority; rather, each provider has at least one (and usually multiple) separate resources and/or services that must beshared and/or negotiated [13][14]. The term Federation in communications was introduced in 90s to facilitate different transport networks to connect and exchange data with each other according to a common agreement [15]. From this initial definition “A federation is a peer-to-peer relationship between two or more parties involved in order to achieve a common goal” [15], many definitions have been proposed. Currently, the concept of Federation is used in many different contexts.

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However, the usual main connotation of “Federation” with respect to telecommunications is to enable new services across a growing range of communication and computing infrastructures to be defined by different providers (or other administrative entities), such that the result enables a transparent end-to-end service to be available to the end-user. Here, “transparent” means that the end-user is not aware that the service he or she is using is actually provided by multiple providers. Hence, an important connotation for Federation is that services that a Federation provides should appear to be produced by a single entity. A recent definition refines this concept highlighting the interoperability tasks when IP network entities interact following common agreements, thus the concept is as follow: “Federation is any governance environment in which two or more autonomous administrative domains must interoperate for their mutual advantage, and where they must establish business, trust and technical agreements to make that happen” [16]. Particular approaches based on applying the concept of federation to applications focus more on the effects of federation than the nature of the concept itself. Thus, an early application for Federation was to “enable sharing and exchange of information for service or content configuration, composition, consumption or delivery and coordination with each other, according to agreed policies and rules” [17]. From this perspective, Federation has two important implications: (i) designing platforms without unnecessarily replicating functionalities and data, and (ii) building inter-connected, inter-operating and/or interworking platforms. In terms of Autonomic Management, a particular definition for “Federation”, rises from a telecommunications perspective, describing a grouping of semi-autonomous entities (entities with certain level of independence to take decisions) dealing with each other to realize a common goal following agreed rules by all the entities, in such grouping each entity can play different roles. This refines the definition to: “A federation is a set of domains that are governed by either a single central authority or a set of distributed collaborating governing authorities in which each domain has a set of limited powers regarding their own local interests.” In this definition, a “domain” is defined as “a collection of Entities that share a common purpose; the domain is a conceptual container that defines a common set of (1) administrators that govern the managed entities that it contains, (2) applications that are responsible for different governance operations, such as monitoring, and (3) management mechanisms, such as policy rules, that are used to implement the various governance operations. • Entities in a federation must be able to perform and establish secure business transactions. This requires technical and trust agreements between the parties. • Each domain in the federation has a set of administrative


roles that clearly separate local and federated governance operations. Local operations are those that are defined by each domain, whereas federated governance operations are those that are defined by the federation that all domain members agree to abide by and enforce. • Federations must be seen as management environments to support self-governance and self-management activities/operations for heterogeneous technologies following common agreements between the diverse semi-autonomous components supporting end-to-end solutions and thus constituting a federation. Today, many systems and applications do not properly distinguish between “federation” and “governance”. For the purposes of this paper, “governance is defined as a set of decisions, made by users and implemented using software, that manages resources and services provided to a customer”. Note that both domains and the federation as a whole provide governance, the former on a local scale and independent of the Federation, and the latter on a global scale as part of the Federation. B. Autonomics The Future Internet can not be conceived without systems acting and reacting in a dynamic form to the changes in its surrounding (context-awareness), even more the systems must be able for self-managing considering end-user requirements and acting in autonomous forms offering added value services. Autonomics is a clear example where traditional definitions describing self-management emerge [18][19]. However, most of them are based on very-high level human directives, rather than fully or partially automatic low-level management operations. While many aspects of the network will be selfmanaged based on high-level policies [5], the aggregation and subsequent understanding of monitoring/fault data is a problem that has not yet been completely solved. In federations is necessary support the negotiations between different sub-systems having common agreements and achieve common goals in way that each entity (component, system, etc) be able to manage their own resources according services demands and additionally respond to federated services. The federation and its agreed management operations uses the capabilities from the autonomics systems to, for example, the solution of common problems between different subsystems even if the systems are at different domain levels managing, applications, services and/or networks. This function in federation can be compared in how the management labor is delegated but important decisions are implemented straight forward when common services are requiring such federated operation by an entity or service.

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C. Management In this paper management principles are described as the mechanism to support federation of end-to-end communication services, in this paper we do not discuss if federation is an operation when management is being executed or if management is the feature to support federation. However we believe that in the Future Internet, management operations act as the mechanisms to control entities offering certain level of autonomy and the federation as a tool to orchestrate them, thus following this assumption management support federation. When services, components composing the service, the server farms, the network allocations, physical devices into networks, the network itself, etc. are being managed in a independent system, even if it is autonomically [20][21], the federation does not look like acquire some importance. But when the components are oriented to satisfy the requirements of value-added federated end-to-end services over heterogeneous technology, federation emerge as a suitable alternative governing of diverse and heterogeneous systems. Generally Autonomic management is concentrated to control, in an autonomous form, those operational activities (application, service and/or network) providing communication system support offering such capabilities to the federation as an inherent feature in the Future Internet where all these concepts are related. D. End-to-End Services End-to-end communication services involves configuring service and network resources in accordance to the policies of the actors involved in the management process. An autonomic management system provides automatic feedback to progressively improve management policies as service usage and resource utilization change. A goal of autonomic systems is to provide rich usage data to guide rapid service innovation. Once the concepts Federation, Autonomics, Management and End-to-end has been reviewed and there are clear definitions about what is the meaning of Federation, however up to date there are no clear implications around what federation offers in communications either what federation in the Future internet with service systems using heterogeneous network technologies imply, thus this research objective pursue to asset clearly those challenges and requirements A clear scenario where federation could be and in a midterm must be applied, and however there are no still a clear awareness of this fact, is the Internet, in today’s Internet it is observed the growing trend for services to be both provided and consumed by loosely coupled value networks of consumers, providers and combined consumer and providers. These valued networks acting “ideally” as independent selfmanagement entities must combine efforts to offer “common” and “agreed” services. However many times conflicts obstacle such activity.


III. FEDERATION OF NETWORK & ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS – FUTURE INTERNET SCENARIO Management and configuration of large-scale and highly distributed and dynamic enterprise and networks applications is becoming increasingly complex at the network and enterprise application levels. In the current Internet typical large enterprise systems contain thousands of physically distributed software components that communicate across different networks to satisfy end-to-end services client requests. Given the possibility of multiple network connection points for the components cooperating to serve a request (e.g., the components may be deployed in different data centres), the variability in service demand and network operating conditions, it is very difficult avoid conflicts between different monitoring and management systems to provide effective endto-end applications monitoring and managing the network, together, in a “harmony” way that is cognisant of the complex interactions between each other. In this scenario federation plays a crucial role to reduce the conflict and offer suitable mechanism to orchestrate and coordinate such operations. In the end-to-end services scenario, we are exploring how monitoring and fault management information at application, service, middleware and hardware levels can be gathered, analysed, aggregated and correlated as part of a federated control loop supporting the end-to-end management of large enterprise applications and the network services. As depicted in Figure 1, we support the idea that monitoring data at the network level can be used to generate knowledge that can be used to support federated enterprise application management. Feature necessary in the communications in Future Internet.

Figure 1. Monitoring and Self-Management Control Loop in Federated Management Support A. End-to-End Service Management Scenario Approach. In this scenario conversely, we also investigate what information enterprise application management systems can provide to federate management systems to allow the latter to more robustly and efficiently allocate network services. More specifically, work is being carried out to develop monitoring techniques that can be applied to record, analyse, correlate and visualise information and trends in both network management systems and enterprise application management systems, in a manner such that a coherent view of the communication profiles of different application-level and network-level services can be built.

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Appropriate means of normalising, interpreting, sharing and visualising this knowledge will be developed to support tight federation between enterprise applications and collaborative network management systems. B. Research Outputs Supporting Federation • Techniques and tools for relevant monitoring functionality in network and enterprise domains. • Algorithms and processes to allow federation in enterprise application systems to visualize software components, functionality and performance. • Guidelines and techniques for knowledge exchange between network and enterprise management systems. • Techniques for analysis, filtering, detection and comprehension of monitoring data in enterprise and network. • Traffic information and processes those are cognizant of abnormal behavior in network devices that can be used for application- and network-level requests. • Algorithms and processes to allow enterprise application management systems reconfigure or redeploy software components realizing application functionality. • Guidelines and exemplars for the exchange of relevant knowledge between network and enterprise application management systems. IV. SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK This paper presents a set of basic definitions and main challenges facing federation in communication industry. Federation emerges as a requirement in future communications being supported by diverse technologies with their information models following diverse business goals. Federation in its current application for communications concentrates for offering to the management systems the flexibility to support agile decision making by service providers to rapidly changing service systems operations and networking performance needs following common systems agreements. Federation and autonomic management research requirements and challenges are being supported as crucial objectives to achieve certain level of federation in communications systems. The requirements described in this paper are taken from as the management challenges defined in the Autonomic Communication Forum [22] and in the current Ireland-based FAME scientific research cluster [23]. In this paper major implication for federation of different (network & enterprise) communication management systems supporting end-to-end services for future communications and services over the Internet are discussed. Future Internet design activity is extensive and the management plays a more dynamic role in such activity, federation is acting as the mediator between systems which independently execute operations, at the end will contribute to support better and more embedded services as a common goal.


ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research activity is partially funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), grant 08/SRC/I1403 FAME-SRC (Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-End Communications Services - Scientific Research Cluster). In collaboration with Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), funded by the WCU program through the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Project No. R31-2008-000-10100-0).

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