Collaborative Research Project within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission

Partners :

Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs France
Alcatel Lucent Ireland Limited
Alcatel Lucent Deutschland AG
HITACHI UK
NEC Europe Ltd.
Thales Communications SA
France Telecom SA
Telecom Italia S.p.A
Telefonica Investigacion Y Desarrollo SA
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Zur Foerderung Der Angewandten Forschung E.V
Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
University College London
University of Surrey
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
University of Piraeus Research Center
Universiteit Twente

September 2010 to August 2013

The UniverSelf projectis an Integrating Project (IP) co-funded by the European Commission under the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7).

The goal of UniverSelf is to consolidate autonomic methods for the future Internet for business-driven, service and network management into a novel Unified Management Framework (UMF) evolving through cognition. This UMF will remove the roadblocks of the original Internet design and of its later patchwork growth; it will seamlessly unite the heterogeneous control and management planes towards a true end-to-end scope by enabling self-organization of the former and empowering the latter with cognition. This will advance the routine management tasks by human administrators to the level of governance of the entire network and service ecosystem.

The Unified Management Framework will be realized by pursuing a “dual-axis” approach, continuously ensuring their complementarities:

• a bottom-up axis, in which a scenario based approach, considering services and systems, both wireline and wireless, will be used to design a management system that aims at resolving operators’ day-to-day problems identified in live networks and on existing service/network architectures
• a top-down axis, in which UniverSelf will capitalize on previous autonomic architecture research to achieve a coherent set of autonomic network management functionalities that can interwork in a scalable manner

In order to achieve high impact, UniverSelf will implement select autonomic functions in real devices and operator scenarios. It will also contribute towards standardization and certification work in the area of autonomic networking. Together with a large-scale demonstrator which integrates multiple autonomic functions in a heterogeneous context, this shall convince operators and ISPs that autonomic principles are not just a research issue, but are highly helpful and economically beneficial in actual network deployments.

NEC’s focus within UniverSelf is to design, develop and evaluate self-organization and self-optimization strategies to mobile operator networks (i.e. SON for Mobile Core). This will include research into the following areas:

• Identification, specification and evaluation of required self-x methods in different operator network scenarios, with a focus on network/node/service discovery, load-aware routing, load balancing and service migration/adaptation in mobile operator networks
• Self-awareness and self–improvement of autonomic methods in the area of resilience and self-healing in overloaded/misbehaving networks or networks under attack
• Representation, creation and evaluation of policies for autonomic network management .
  
  

Please find the project's publications at the official UniverSelf website.

Official UniverSelf Web Site.