The co-Evolution of Networks and Devices: Autonomics and Device Management

by Wedge Greene & Trevor Hayes

Our world of communications just keeps getting bigger. So too does our job of managing this burgeoning world. Today we can see that our historical ability to manage millions of connections is going to have to somehow scale to manage tomorrow’s trillions of devices. We propose a composite Service and Device Management Framework that provides for (A) autonomic devices which connect to (B) a series of network resident, server hosted active models that virtualize the many interactions and groups that the device, and its user/customer, is participating. Each device reports its image of the world about it to this virtual, composite model. There this information is matched to and combined with all the reports from all the other devices about it. Each device can really only know itself, but the network can collect state and data from all the plurality of interconnected devices: sometimes directly, sometimes trading for it through collaborative interfaces to other service providers. We call this network resident model, the Operational Consciousness of the device.
Someone will eventually provide the ultimate management service. We feel it goes beyond looking at components and frameworks. We see the opportunity to completely reinvent the Service Provider for the 21st century.

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Wedge Greene is a consultant for LTC International.