Advanced reconfiguration framework based on game theoretical techniques in autonomic communication systems

The Autonomic Communications concept forms one promising solution to accommodate the increased complexity of legacy and emerging systems, fostering the automation and minimizing the need for human intervention. This notion implies the introduction of advanced mechanisms for autonomic decision making and self-configuration. The focus of this work is on the introduction of an advanced reconfiguration framework for the support of the following functionalities: i) efficient strategies of terminal attachment to heterogeneous wireless systems are proposed dependent on the evaluation of input stimuli from the surrounding telecom environment. ii) it is shown how to enable optimized selection and attribution of resources, iii) the application of new device configuration is examined, proposing a framework for dynamic protocol stack adaptation. It is indeed necessary to introduce a framework that will enable, policy based reconfiguration decisions supporting dynamic and optimal discovery, download and replacement of necessary protocol functionality. In this context, legacy management and control mechanisms should be enriched with such features operating in either terminal or network equipment. Namely, this contribution discusses cognitive reconfiguration management issues by introducing two basic reconfiguration units encapsulated in a unified management and control architecture: i) the component based protocol stack reconfiguration framework and ii) the resource usage optimization unit. Simulation and performance results presented in the paper prove the technical feasibility of the proposed mechanisms as well as the optimization of reconfiguration actions.