European Commission "Information Society Technologies" (IST), 6th Framework

ETH Zurich
Universität Basel
NEC EUROPE LTD
University of Lancaster
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. (FOKUS)
Universite de Liege
Universite Paris VI Pierre et Marie Curie
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
University of Oslo
Telekom Austria
University of Waterloo

January 2006 to December 2009

The Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) integrated project is co-sponsored by the European Commission under the Information Society Technology (IST) priority on Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) under the 6th Framework Programme. 

The ANA project aims at exploring novel ways of organizing and using networks beyond legacy Internet technology. The ultimate goal is to design and develop a novel network architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomic formation of network nodes as well as whole networks. It will allow dynamic adaptation and re-organisation of the network according to the working, economical and social needs of the users. This is expected to be especially challenging in a mobile context where new resources become available dynamically, administrative domains change frequently, and the economic models may vary.

The scientific objective of this proposal is to identify fundamental autonomic network principles. Moreover, this project will build, demonstrate, and test such an autonomic network architecture. The key attribute is that such a network scales in a functional way that is, the network can extend both horizontally (more functionality) as well as vertically (different ways of integrating abundant functionality).

The challenge addressed in this project is to come up with a network architecture and to fill it with the functionality needed to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomic networking within the coming 4 years.

NEC develops new, autonomic networking paradigms and communication mechanisms that will result in the ANA "Blueprint" architecture. Furthermore, NEC is leading the ANA "Communication System" design and development activities with particular focus on novel naming, addressing and routing paradigms, as well as self-association and self-organization capabilities for ANA nodes and networks.

J. J. Silva Tobella, M. Stiemerling, M. Brunner, Towards Self-Configuration of IPv6 Routers, In Proc. of IEEE/IFIP Network Operations & Management Symposium (NOMS 2004 ), Seoul, Korea, April 2004.

S. Schmid, L. Eggert, M. Brunner, J. Quittek, TurfNet: An Architecture for Dynamically Composable Networks , In Proc. of 1st IFIP International Workshop on Autonomic Communications (WAC 2004), LNCS 3457, pp. 94 - 114, Berlin, Germany, October 2004.

S. Schmid, L. Eggert, M. Brunner, J. Quittek, Towards Autonomous Network Domains, In Proc. of 8th IEEE Global Internet Symposium 2005 , Miami, FL, March 2005.

M. Brunner, S. Schuetz, J. J. Silv Tobella, M. Stiemerling, Plug and Play Configuration for Composable Networks, In Proc. of 9th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Management (IM 2005 ), Nice France, May 2005.

D. P. Pezaros, M. Sifalakis, S. Schmid, D. Hutchison. Dynamic Link Measurements using Active Components, In Proc. of 6th International Working Conference on Active Networks (IWAN 2004 ), Kansas, USA, October 2005.

K. Zimmermann, S. Felis, S. Schmid, L. Eggert, M. Brunner, Autonomic Wireless Network Management Under submission at 2nd IFIP TC6 International Workshop on Autonomic Communication (WAC 2005 ), October 3-5, 2005 , Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, 12 pages

S. Schmid, M. Sifalakis, D. Hutchison, Towards Autonomic Networks, Accepted at 1st IFIP TC6 Conference on Autonomic Networking (AN2006), Paris, France, September 2006.

Official ANA Web Site