Autonomic fault-management and resilience from the perspective of the network operation personnel

Autonomic networks are an emerging technology which is promising to reduce the complexity of human-driven network management processes and enable a variety of so-called self-* features such as self-configuration, self-optimization, etc, inside the network devices and the network as a whole. Autonomic behaviors are widely understood as a control loop implemented by an autonomic entity that automates management processes and controls diverse aspects of a set of resources. Though automation is necessary and achievable, autonomic decision-making-elements of the network can not fully perform decisions on every task of the network without requiring some degree of "a human-in-the-loop" in some of the decisions. From the operator's perspective, controllability of the control loop and decision notification from the autonomic network is a vital issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper we present our considerations on how an Autonomic Fault-Management control loop ("detect an incident" - "find the root cause behind it" - "remove the root cause") can be controlled by the network operation personnel. ©2010 IEEE.