Design and implementation of a dynamic network architecture for the development of autonomic applications

During the last twenty years, the Internet has radically changed pushed by an ever growing interest both from users and operators. This unexpected success has highlighted an important consequence and limitation which is related to the growing complexity associated with the management of communication infrastructures. As systems and networks become more and more interconnected and heterogenous, in fact, operators and designers are less capable to foresee emergent and non linear interactions among components. odern communication and distributed computing scenarios are increasingly being populated with a variety of new heterogeneous communication technologies and computer devices, both wired and wireless, where failure of components are considered the norm. As a consequence, the resultant behaviours cannot be anticipated and potential control strategies are not suitable to be planned in advance. The Autonomic Networking is a novel communication paradigm whose fundamental objective consists in overcoming the growing complexity and heterogeneity of existing communication networks by introducing the concept of self-management. In this thesis we present a proposal for a dynamic network architecture whose main objective consists in providing infrastructures and mechanisms to support the design and development of new forms of applications based on the principles of the autonomic networking paradigm. An application of the proposed architecture to collaborative network security is also presented.