The CASCADAS Framework for Autonomic Communication

An interesting approach to the design and development of the future Internetforesees a networked service eco-system capable of seamlessly offering servicesfor human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.This chapter builds in this direction by describing a distributed component-wareframework for autonomic and situation-aware communication developed within theCASCADAS project. The core of this framework is the Autonomic CommunicationElement (ACE), an innovative software abstraction capable of providing dynamicallyadaptable services that can be built, composed, and let evolve according toautonomic principles. Services are capable of adapting their logic to the dynamicallychanging context they operate in without human intervention. As a result,whenever the need arises, ACEs can be federated autonomously and produce newservices on a situation-aware basis. Systems and, in particular, eco-systems can thusbe conceived as collections of ACEs.The chapter introduces the concept of ACE and its different facets. It also presentsthe architecture of a prototype ACE-based platform and exemplifies the differentconcepts through a future Pervasive Behavioral Advertisement scenario.