Autonomic/Autonomous Networking (AN): Federations & Governance of ANs, Progress & Open Challenges in Standards: Analysis Report

Future Networks, Beyond 5G and 6G, will continue to expand in scale, complexity and interconnectivity, and will be highly shaped by distributed systems that serve various use cases that go beyond current Use Cases like mMTC (massive Machine Type Communications) and URLLC (Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications). This will be coupled with an increasing demand for autonomy in self-organization and self-management, automation and interoperability on a very dynamic flexible basis. Systems-of-systems architectures will become more relevant as multiple autonomous/semi-autonomous systems adaptively seek to operate and interact with their peers (including in the advent of so-called “symbiotic autonomous systems”). Research on autonomous systems and autonomic networks recognizes the benefits to making autonomic/autonomous systems interact with each other when needed and should explore frameworks that will enable this dynamic interactivity under the emerging concept of Federation of Autonomic/Autonomous networks (ANs). Autonomy and Degree of Autonomy in ANs should be subjected to “governance by humans” through their exposure of Governance Interfaces to make sure ANs solely serve purposes that humans expect of them and not negatively impact environment and society. The use of Federation and in some cases Governance interfaces and mechanisms is a promising technology for interconnecting systems, enabling innovation and service delivery by the federating AN systems; and allowing asset sharing and extending traditional eco-systems and value-chains with further resources and stakeholders (including new ones that were never involved in the traditional ICT ecosystems but should now be involved in 5G and 6G ecosystems). The paper provides an analysis of the aspects of relevance to the broader picture of ANs in standardization efforts, multi-layer autonomic systems design and operational principles, federation and governance of ANs, progress and open challenges in standards, so as to provide contributions on what needs to be complemented to ongoing efforts in standardization groups. This paper also serves to give an analysis of progress in key topics of the IEEE workshop held on this subject (of which the paper contributed).