New paradigms for communication/networking systems are needed in order to tackle the emerging issues such as heterogeneity, complexity and management of evolvable infrastructures. Such advanced systems possess a composition of characteristics including: Situated: they sense and react locally onto environment and context changes. Autonomously managed: their actions are decided using local knowledge and self-managing principles. Colloborative: they communicate and share knowledge optimizing functionality for suvivability. The intelligence of such networks relies not on the nodes themselves, but is directly associated with their size, complexity, communication and collaboration capabilities. Self-organizing: they reorganize and form communities on-the-fly based on the local/global goals and communication needs. Highly distributed: they use decentralized optimization strategies and cross-layer or non-layered approaches should be applicable. Technology independent: they will be built on abstraction layers that make it possible to develop modular approaches where software and hardware components can be exchanged on the fly.Scale-free: they can scale up to very large numbers without exhibiting any visible impact on the performance and functionality.
In order to realize such advanced systems, communcation/networking approaches should become task-and knowledge-driven, enabling a service oriented, requirement and trust driven development of communication networks. This should allow developing networking technologies (hardware/software combinations) that can evolve and create maximal synergy with the other types of non-technological networks that consitute their context. The growing complexity of control requires increasingly distributed and self-organizing structures, relying on simple and dependable elements that are able to collaborate to produce sophisticated behaviors and that can adapt to an evolving situation, in which new resources can become available, administrative domains can change and economic models can vary accordingly.The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies, devies in a dynamically changing environment sets many many challenges to the research community, including interoperability, programmability, management, openness, reliability, performance, context awareness, intelligence, autonomy, security, privacy, safety, semantics, etc.
This edited volume explores the challenges in technolgies that will help realize the vision where devices and applications seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate and autonomously manage themselves, and as a result, the borders of virtual and real world will vanish or become significantly blurred.