Introducing a light-weight autonomic network middleware based on stigmergic mechanisms

Autonomous systems are capable of performing activities by taking into account the local environment and adapting to it. No planning is necessary therefore autonomous systems have to make the best of the resources at hand. Locality in this case is no longer geographical but rather the information and applications on the boundary of the autonomic communicating element which may be distributed over a wide area. The aim of outonomous communication systems is that they exhibit self-awareness properties, in particular self-contextualisation, self-programmability and self-management. In this paper, we identify the need,for autonomous systems, their architecture, the path of evolution from traditional network elements, the need for open networks and future trends within autonomic computing.