A group of 17 leading European telecommunications service providers, IT corporations, infrastructure vendors and academic institutions have launched "UniverSelf" that aims to develop autonomic networking technologies.
The goal of this initiative is to overcome the increasing complexity of managing communication networks and enable their future growth by generating innovations in autonomic networking – technologies that enable networks to manage themselves.
The offerings "UniverSelf" will benefit the European ICT industry by creating business opportunities and standards, and benefit EU citizens by improving quality of service and improving performance.
It will also benefit telecommunications service providers and network operators by reducing time-to-market and increasing savings in operational expenditure through the increasing human resources and a reduction in manual errors.
UniverSelf will last 36 months (2010-2013) and take advantage of the expertise and skills of its members who represent the corporations and research institutions from across the ICT industry are Alcatel-Lucent (Project Coordinator), NEC Europe (DE) France Telecom (Technical Manager), Telecom Italia (IT), Telefonica I+D (ES), and others.
The objectives of this research program are to design a unified management framework for the different existing and emerging architectures, i.e. wireless and wireline and will serve as a common platform for both systems and services.
It also plans to design the functions that will enable self-managing networks and embed these functions directly within the systems and elements that comprise the network infrastructure and support service delivery.
The project will demonstrate the potential for deployment of autonomic offering in carrier grade networks with an eye towards stimulating further research in Europe towards application and commercialisation.
It also aims to generate confidence in the viability and use of autonomic technologies in telecommunication networks by defining "certification" parameters for autonomic networking products.
Bell Labs and project coordinator research director Martin Vigoureux said UniverSelf, driven by user needs and focused on the industrial impact of research, is an instrument to start engineering autonomics and make them a reality in operational networks.
Telecom Italia project manager Antonio Manzalini said autonomic self-management might be part of this vision, considering also that these future networks have to be managed in highly dynamic and unpredictable contexts.
Telefonica autonomic communications division manager Jose Antonio Lozano-Lopez said UniverSelf pragmatic approach to autonomic will provide not only the networking procedures, but also the governance methods and tools to dramatically decrease OPEX on Operators’ operational processes.
