Advanced Network Architectures for Prioritized Operations

When a network is global in size, the idea that it can be adequately monitored and adjusted in real time by a limited human staff of operators rapidly becomes obsolete. Future networks will require much more approaches that assume a high degree of fully automated prioritization, fault recovery, and security responses than is possible with current manually-intensive administration approaches. The need for more automated administration is further increased by the rapidly increasing convergence of voice, data, and other forms of communications onto a single network architecture. Automatically fault-tolerant network management strategies will be needed to allow dynamic prioritization based on mission priorities, and will need to support capabilities such as self-healing and self-organization to accomplish rapid, effective automated management of resources. Our goal in this Phase I project is to design and prototype the core features of a system supporting these features.