Autonomic Renumbering in the Future Internet

Overview & Synopsis

IPv6 is an essential building block of the evolution towards the future Internet. To take the full benefit of this protocol and exploit all its features, the future Internet needs to gracefully couple it with autonomics. In this paper we demonstrate through our experience with network renumbering how the coupling of both IPv6 core functionality extended with major functions of the autonomic world can lead to fully autonomous activities of main management functions. We instantiate the notions of self-configuration, self-monitoring, self-protection and self-healing in the network renumbering process and show how they can altogether make renumbering a real success. We illustrate the various functions with the tools we implemented to support them over the last three years.