A P2P-Based self-healing service for network maintenance

The introduction of self-* properties over distributed network management infrastructures has been proving to be a feasible approach for the new demands of modern network management. Among the properties of the self-* management vision, self-healing figures as key property in improving the dependability of the managed infrastructures. An interesting possibility to materialize self-* support - and self-healing support as well - in network management is through the employment of peer-to-peer (P2P) management overlays. Considering this scenario, we introduce in this paper a self-healing service provided by a prototype P2P-Based Network Management (P2PBNM) system. Such a service is expected to be contracted by human administrators interested in monitoring and recovering their IT infrastructures. In addition, an experimental evaluation of the self-healing service is performed considering a case study where a Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) needs to be constantly observed and eventually healed to keep the underlying communication network protected.