The CASCADAS Framework for Autonomic Communications

An interesting approach to the design and development of the future Internet foresees a networked service eco-system capable of seamlessly offering services for human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions. This chapter builds in this direction by describing a distributed component-ware framework for autonomic and situation-aware communication developed within the CASCADAS project. The core of this framework is the Autonomic Communication Element (ACE), an innovative software abstraction capable of providing dynamically adaptable services that can be built, composed, and let evolve according to autonomic principles. Services are capable of adapting their logic to the dynamically changing context they operate in without human intervention. As a result, whenever the need arises, ACEs can be federated autonomously and produce new services on a situation-aware basis. Systems and, in particular, eco-systems can thus be conceived as collections of ACEs. The chapter introduces the concept of ACE and its different facets. It also presents the architecture of a prototype ACE-based platform and exemplifies the different concepts through a future Pervasive Behavioral Advertisement scenario. Luciano Baresi Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, e-mail: [email protected] Antonio Di Ferdinando Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, [email protected] Antonio Manzalini Telecom Italia Lab, e-mail: [email protected] Franco Zambonelli Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell’Ingegneria, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, [email protected]