Topics in network and service management

his is the fourth issue of the Series on Network and Service Management that will be published twice a year, in April and October, from now on. The series provides articles on the latest developments in this well established discipline, highlighting recent research achievements, and providing insight into both theoretical and practical issues related to the evolution of the discipline from different perspectives. The series provides a forum for the publication of both academic and industrial research, addressing the state of the art, theory, and practice in network and service management. In the last two editorials we mentioned that the recently established IEEE Electronic Transactions on Network and Service Management (eTNSM) journal had passed key IEEE approval stages, becoming a full fledged IEEE transactions journal from January 2007. The journal has published so far two issues per year; http://www. comsoc.org/eTNSM. The editorial of the second quarter 2006 issue states the following: " In the past few years we have witnessed a significant growth in the area of network and service management, yet at the same time we lacked a corresponding presence and visible venue in IEEE to publish high-quality papers in this area. eTNSM was established by the Communications Society in 2004 as an introductory initiative for timely electronic presentation of archival research on the management of networks, systems, services and applications, as well as on issues in communications software, service engineering, policies and business processes for network and service management. The success of the eTNSM trial encouraged the initiative toward a proposal for an IEEE transactions journal in this area. In June 2006, a new journal titled IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM) has gone through the last phase approval by the IEEE and will start as a full fledged IEEE Transactions in January 2007. This is an exciting event for the systems research community at large and for the network and service management community in particular! " Another important development for the community has been, at the end of 2006, the completion of a year of integration work of the European EMANICS project on Management of the Internet and Complex Services. This is an EU Network of Excellence that brings together 13 research institutions active in the area of network and service management. It encompasses work areas dealing with integration (long-term vision, virtual laboratory, and testbeds), dissemination (a new European conference, discussed later, electronic dissemination, training …