The purpose of this special issue is to give an overview on the state-of-the art and the latest results in Autonomic Communication (AC) - a new communication paradigm to assist the evolution of communication networks towards functional adaptability, extensibility and resilience to a wide range of possible faults and attacks.. Special emphasis is given on the grounding principles to achieve purposeful behavior on top of self-organization (including self-management, self-healing, self-awareness, etc.).
Papers are solicited that study network element's autonomic behavior exposed by innovative (cross-layer optimized, context-aware, and securely programmable) protocol stack in its interaction with numerous often-dynamic network groups and communities. The goals are to understand how autonomic behaviors are learned, influenced or changed, and how, in turn, these affect other elements, groups and the network.
The self-organized Internet will be able to sense its environment, to perceive these changes and to understand the meaning of these changes, thus facilitating new ways to perform network control, management, middle box communication, service creation, etc. This will be based on universal and fine-grained multiplexing of numerous policies, rules and events that are done autonomously but facilitate desired behavior of groups of network elements. Though the primary application domain is the Internet, papers addressing autonomic communication principles for mission critical distributed systems are also welcome.