Autonomic Networks / Self-Management

Networks have become ubiquitous in our lives. The humanity is dependent on a functioning of a multitude of different networks. Even for experts, manually running these networks has grown to a increasingly difficult task close to impossibility. It is therefore indispenable to increase management automation up to a state of autonomy.

Not only larger operator controlled networks are important also smaller scale networks have a growing importance. More and more devices in our houses and our everyday lives have networking capabilities to offer advanced functionality.

We target management automation from several directions.

Content-Centric Management for Future Networks

We are currently developing a platform for secure distributed autonomic content-centric management. Our aim is to contribute to the standardization of a network management that meets the requirements of today.

With the raising amount of technical equipment in our daily environments (e.g. at home), autonomic functionality becomes necessary to automatically integrate new hardware. With the abstraction of our platform new applications become possible that make life more agreeable…

Besides the core architecture our special research interests are Remote Access, Trust mechanisms, Security as well as Services and Applications for networks with our new autonomic mechanisms.

Large Multitechnology Operator controlled networks

Management of Operator Networks, especially mobile networks has grown very complicated for several reasons.

There is a increasing number of access technologies that are used within a single network. Several generations of the same technologies have to be seamlessly integrated to provide a unique user experience. As for example the parallel operation of 2G, 3G and 3.5G networks. In the future additional radio technologies as for example LTE or WiMAX will be integrated in the same way. Operators have to handle the large number of Network Elements but also have to provide a fine tuned configuration to enable seamless operation between different access networks. In order to handle those heterogeneous multi vendor networks with their complex inderdependencies new management concepts are required.  We focus to provide a system that offers a high degree of automation and aims at autonomic management while stilll beeing under full operator control. Operation and maintenance staff should be freed from time consuming standard tasks to allow them to focus on critical situations and the optimization of the network. In case the automated functions do not act as expected the operator still has the possibliity to overrule the system.

Such an autonomic management system requires a way to include operational experience and the possibility to dynamically adapt to the current context.

Scientists: Johannes Späth, M.Sc., Dr. Holger Kinkelin, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Georg Carle, Prof. Dr. Marc-Oliver Pahl

Projects: AutHoNe

Publications

2012-10-01	Thomas Kothmayr, Corinna Schmitt, Wen Hu, Michael Bruenig, Georg Carle, “A DTLS Based End-To-End Security Architecture for the Internet of Things with Two-Way Authentication,” in Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Practical Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications (SenseApp), Clearwater (FL), USA, Oct. 2012. [Bib]
2011-11-01	Thomas Kothmayr, Wen Hu, Corinna Schmitt, Michael Brünig, Georg Carle, “Securing the Internet of Things with DTLS,” in Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Poster Session, Seattle, USA, Nov. 2011. [Bib]
2011-09-01	Lothar Braun, Corinna Schmitt, Benoit Claise, Georg Carle, “Compressed IPFIX for smart meters in constrained networks.” Internet-Draft (work in progress), draft-braun-core-compressed-ipfix-03.txt, Sep-2011. [Url] [Bib]
2010-09-01	Alexander Klein, Lothar Braun, Corinna Schmitt, Georg Carle, “MAUS: A Multi-hop Autonomous Sensor Network for Monitoring Applications with Full IP-support,” in Proceedings of the 9. GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch Sensornetze (FGSN), Würzburg, Germany, Sep. 2010. [Bib]
2010-08-01	Holger Kinkelin, Andreas Müller, Georg Carle, “Security and Access control for future home networks.” Demo at IPTComm 2010, Munich, Germany, Aug-2010. [Bib]
2010-08-01	Marc-Oliver Pahl, Georg Carle, “Automatic control and Management Platform (ACMP).” Demo at IPTComm 2010, Munich, Germany, Aug-2010. [Url] [Bib]
2010-06-01	Holger Kinkelin, Heiko Niedermayer, Ralph Holz, Georg Carle, “TPM-based Access Control for the Future Internet (ext. abstract),” in 5th GI/ITG KuVS Workshop on Future Internet, Stuttgart, Germany, Jun. 2010. [Bib]
2010-04-01	Corinna Schmitt, Lothar Braun, Thomas Kothmayr, Georg Carle, “Collecting Sensor Data using Compressed IPFIX,” in Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Poster Session, Stockholm, Sweden, Apr. 2010. [Bib]
2010-03-01	Marc-Oliver Pahl, Andreas Müller, Mario Schuster, Thomas Luckenbach, Christoph Niedermeier, Juergen Reichmann, “AutHoNe - Autonomic Networking.” Celtic News, Mar-2010. [Bib]
2010-02-01	Thomas Kothmayr, Corinna Schmitt, Lothar Braun, Georg Carle, “Gathering Sensor Data in Home Networks with IPFIX,” in Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2010), Coimbra, Portugal, Feb. 2010. [Bib]
2009-10-01	Corinna Schmitt, Lothar Braun, Georg Carle, “IPFIX for Wireless Sensors.” Internet-Draft (work in progress), draft-schmitt-6lowapp-ipfix-ws-00, Oct-2009. [Url] [Bib]
2009-04-01	Marc-Oliver Pahl Thomas Luckenbach Mario Schuster, “An Autonomic Home Networking Infrastructure,” ERCIM News - Special theme: Future Internet Technology, no. 77, p. 41, Apr. 2009. [Url] [Bib]