Using Autonomic Principles to Manage Converged Services in Next Generation Networks

Network resources will always be heterogeneous, and thus have different functionalities and programming models. This adversely affects interoperability. Seamless Mobility is one example of how next generation networks and devices require a new approach for network management. This letter is an abstract of my ICAC 2006 keynote, which describes how our new FOCALE architecture can be used in such an environment. This approach establishes a common "lingua franca" through the combination of information models and knowledge engineering, which together can be used to discover and program semantically similar functionality for heterogeneous devices regardless of the data and language used by each device. FOCALE is a semantically rich, context-aware, policy-based architecture for orchestrating the behavior of heterogeneous and distributed computing resources