Self‐aware management of IP networks with QoS guarantees

Self‐aware management allows the network to react and to adapt to changes of situation. In this paper an architecture is described for self‐aware management of IP networks offering QoS guarantees. This architecture uses policy‐based management and multi‐agent systems. The originality of the present approach lies in the intention to give a real autonomy to the components intervening in the chain of services in terms of internal decisions and configuration. Our solution allows the self‐configuration, self‐provisioning and self‐monitoring of service as well as the proactive service level agreement management. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.