SELFNET – FRAMEWORK FOR SELF-ORGANIZED NETWORK MANAGEMENT IN VIRTUALIZED AND SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKS
The SELFNET project designed and implemented an autonomic network management framework to achieve self-organizing capabilities in managing network infrastructures by automatically detecting and mitigating a range of common network problems that are currently still being manually addressed by network operators, thereby significantly reducing operational costs and improving user experience. SELFNET explores a smart integration of state-of-the-art technologies in Software-Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Self-Organizing Networks (SON), Cloud computing, Artificial intelligence, Quality of Experience (QoE) and Nextgeneration networking to provide a novel intelligent network management framework that is capable of assisting network operators in key management tasks: automated network monitoring by the automatic deployment of NFV applications to facilitate system-wide awareness of Health of Network metrics to have more direct and precise knowledge about the real status of the network; autonomic network maintenance by defining high-level tactical measures and enabling autonomic corrective and preventive actions against existing or potential network problems.
SELFNET is driven by use cases designed to address major network management problems including:
SELF-PROTECTION
Capabilities against distributed cyber-attacks
SELF-HEALING
Capabilities against network failures
SELF-OPTIMIZATION
Capabilities to dynamically improve the performance of the network and the QoE of the users
Composite Use Case
Combination of all Use Cases
SELFNET is designed within this economic and business context to substantially reduce operational costs of network operators by automating a significant number of current labour-intensive network management tasks. Therefore, SELFNET directly addresses the Strand Network Management challenge highlighted by the EC.