Self-Management for a Network of Information

Network management has been traditionally considered in the last stages of the design and development cycles of network technology. The typical modus operandi relies mostly on networkers that manually configure active elements, troubleshoot problems as they arise and reconfigure equipment accordingly. In fact, we note that several initiatives in the Future Internet research area do not take proactive steps towards developing self-managing network architec- tures. This position paper presents the first steps taken towards adopting self-management from the initial design stages of NetInf, an information-centric, clean-slate architecture for the Future Internet, proposed by the 4WARD project. We introduce a preliminary set of guidelines on how to apply in-network management principles to Ne- tInf. Through scenarios, we examine the advantages of tightly inte- grating self-management functionality and network awareness with actual service delivery in NetInf.