Steps Towards Self-Aware Networks
Speaker: Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College, London
Abstract
Self-aware computer networks (SAN) observe their internal behaviour as well as the external systems that they interact with, in order to modify their own behaviour so as to adaptively achieve objectives, such as discovering services for their users, improving their Quality of Service (QoS), reducing their energy consumption, compensating for components which fail or malfunction, detecting and reacting to intrusions, and defending themselves against external attacks. A SAN creates a distributed internal representation of its past and present experience, based on sensing and measurement, with proactive sensing as one of the concurrent activities that it undertakes, including performance monitoring to provide an internal evaluation of how well the network is doing its job and condition monitoring to evaluate its health. Coupling of the measurement-sensory system, the internal representation, decision, and motor control, all distributed across the network nodes, is the key feature of such a system. In this talk we will describe an experimental network that achieves many of these functionalities.
About the Speaker
Erol Gelenbe holds the Dennis Gabor Chair at Imperial College. He received the MS and PhD degrees from Brooklyn Poly, and is a graduate of METU Ankara. A Fellow of IEEE, ACM and IEE, he won the ACM SIGMETRICS Award in 2008 for his work on computer and network performance modelling and analysis. In 2010 he was awarded the Brooklyn Poly Distinguished Alumnus Award and elected Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is a Member of the French National Academy of Engineering (Academie des Technologies), of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, and of Academia Europaea. He received the Italian honours of Commander of Merit, and of Grand Officer of the Order of the Star. France awarded him the honour of Officer of Merit. In 1996 he was the first computer scientist to receive the Grand Prix France Telecom of the French Academy of Sciences. He has received Honoris Causa doctorates from the University of Liege (Belgium), University of Roma II (Italy), and Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey). Erol's research is currently funded by UK EPSRC and EU FP7. He works and consults for industry and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal (Oxford University Press and British Computer Society), and on the editorial board of the Proc. Royal Society A.