Background

Abstract

This Chapter reviews background principles of communication networks and discusses the most relevant research behind this work. Fundamental concepts are recalled by introducing the most significant network infrastructures and technologies existing today (Section 2.1). Particular attention is payed to multi-provider environments where usual networking operations are complicated by the need for coordinated interactions with external domains (see Section 2.2). An overview of the major existing multi-domain management frameworks makes it possible to characterise which specific intra-and inter-domain tasks represent the major challenges in current scenarios. This leads to an analysis of several interworking solutions that have been developed in the last five years and that make use of software agents to automate specific management or control operations (see Section 2.3).

A problem faced in most reasoning situations is that all the information that may be relevant is not available and that what is available is confusing and not necessarily relevant. - Raj Bhatnagar and Laveen N. Kanal, 1992