Raffaele Quitadamo, Franco Zambonelli
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 17(3), pages 457–475
December 2008
The continuous growth in ubiquitous and mobile network connectivity, together with the increasing number of networked devices populating our everyday environments, call for a deep rethinking of traditional communication and service architectures. The emerging area of autonomic communication addresses such challenging issues by trying to identify novel flexible network architectures, and by conceiving novel conceptual and practical tools for the design, development, and execution of “autonomic” (i.e., self-organizing, self-adaptive and context-aware) communication services. In this paper, after having introduced the general concepts behind autonomic communication and autonomic communication services, we analyze the key issue of defining suitable “component” models for autonomic communication services, and discuss the strict relation between such models and agent models. On this basis, we survey and compare different approaches, and eventually try to synthesize the key desirable characteristics that one should expect from a general-purpose component model for autonomic communication services. The key message we will try to deliver is that current research in software agents and multi-agent systems have the potential for playing a major role in inspiring and driving the identification of such a model, and more in general for influencing and advancing the whole area of autonomic communication.
keywords
Autonomic communication services, Self-organization, Self-adaptation, Multi-Agent Systems
origin event
journal or series
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
(J.AAMAS)
container publication
companion publication
funding project
AgentLink III — A Coordination Network for Agent-based Computing
(01/01/2004–31/01/2006)
works as
companion publication for
Special Issue on Foundations, Advanced Topics and Industrial Perspectives of Multi-agent Systems (special issue, 2008) — Andrea Omicini, Peter McBurney
