Autonomic Healing for Service Specific Overlay Networks

Service Specific Overlay Networks (SSONs) have recently attracted a great interest, and have been extensively investigated in the context of multimedia delivery over the internet. SSONs are virtual networks constructed on top of the underlying network and they have been proposed to provide and improve services not provided by other traditional networks to the end users. The increased complexity and heterogeneity of these networks in addition to ever changing conditions in the network and the different types of fault that may occur make their control and management by human administrators more difficult. Therefore, self-healing concept was introduced to handle these changes and assuring highly reliable and dependable network system performance. Self-healing aims at ensuring that the service will continue to work regardless of defects that might occur in the network. This paper introduces literature in the area of self-healing overlay networks, presents their basic concepts, requirements, and architectures. In addition to that the authors present a proposed self-healing architecture for multimedia delivery services. Their proposed solution is oriented to discover new approaches for monitoring, diagnosing, and recovering of services thus achieving self-healing.