Autonomic Management of Context-Aware Ambient Overlay Networks

Ambient networks (ANs) introduce a new dynamic and flexible architecture for fixed and mobile networks. The environment is dynamic since they consist of various mobile nodes and flexible since ANs can compose and decompose dynamically and automatically with other ANs. The AN architecture must be sophisticatedly designed to support such high level of dynamicity, heterogeneity and flexibility. Composition and decomposition is performed at the network-level but since the network topology may change, the service delivery should also be adapted accordingly. Indeed, new services should be user-centric. In this paper, for delivering services adapted to the dynamically changing user and network context, we promote the use of service specific overlay networks in ANs that are created on- demand according to specific service requirements. This paper presents an autonomic approach to create, configure, adapt, contextualize, and finally teardown those context-aware overlay networks.