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Trust by Workflow in Autonomic Communication
Mikhail I. Smirnov
Fraunhofer FOKUS,
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31, 10589 Berlin, Germany
Mikhail.Smirnov@fokus.fraunhofer.de
Abstract.
Autonomic network elements cooperate for media and media signal-
ling delivery; the paper demonstrates how these nodes can elaborate significant
trust and achieve self-organisation by the exchange of blueprints of their inter-
nal packet processing workflows. We outline a model of an etiquette for the
above exchange under the governance of a locally computed community fitness.
We concentrate on the etiquette design using extended protocol expressions as
the notation for behaviours, and ad hoc communication example for the demon-
stration of design steps. We show that properly defined fitness can be used as a
meta-rule modifying the etiquette towards wider or deeper trust within the
community.
1 Introduction
Current progress in the design of wired and wireless network elements demonstrates
the clear trend towards more flexible, finer grained and self-managing packet process-
ing. Self-management [1] is a top of a pyramid comprised of other self-properties:
self-awareness, self-[re]configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, self-protection,
self-adaptation, self-description, and finally self-implementation, or self-* for short.
The autonomic communication research initiative [2] intends to apply self-* to all
facets of communication.
Autonomic Communication studies the individual network element as it is affected
by and affects other elements and the often numerous groups to which it belongs as
well as network in general. The goals are to understand how desired elements behav-
iours are learned, influenced or changed, and how, in turn, these affect other elements,
groups and network. Autonomic communication intends during the design phase to
embed into a system such features that will facilitate right decision making at run-
time, likely involving cross-layer interactions between protocol stack entities. Auto-
nomic decision making will be assisted by locally perceived and processed commu-
nity state under the governance of community fitness.
Trust is the primary issue in IP communication, it is often achieved off path. Fun-
damental lack of security in the Internet is the inherent consequence of its main archi-
tectural principle, known as End-To-End [3, 4] that forbids in-network functionality
placement, thus keeping network open. As it is noted in [22], “closed networks are a
waste of public money, but open networks are a huge risk.” Facilitating end-user
creativity and rapid deployment of new application level services the E2E has created
