Autonomic network engineering: Bridging the gap between research, standards and industry

Autonomic networking aims at mastering the growing complexity of daily network operation. Large research efforts have been spent to design clean-slate and evolutionary architectures for autonomic networks, yet with limited adoption by the telecommunication industry. In order to fill the gaps between research, standards and industry, a global effort involving all stakeholders and a systematic roadmap are required. In this paper, we highlight three essential requirements to fulfil: the need for a unified management framework in an end-to-end and multi-technology environment, the need for test and validation of large-scale implementations to build trust from network operators and the need for standardized interfaces harmonizing the communication between autonomic components.