Addressing stability of control-loops in the context of the GANA architecture: Synchronization of actions and policies

As research on self-managing networks is on the rise, a very important question requiring answers is: How to ensure that all autonomic entities/elements in a network or in a single node work together harmoniously with the aim of maintaining service availability and good levels of quality of service (QoS) provided to the end users? In this paper, we propose to enhance the Generic Autonomic Network Architecture (GANA) a recently emerged architectural Reference-Model for Autonomic Networking, such that actions, policy enforcements and/or (re-) configurations, issued by different autonomic (decision making) entities, are synchronized in such a way that they lead to the best possible (long-term) reaction of the system to the challenging conditions the network is exposed to.