Rethinking large-scale network management through the lens of neuroscience

对通信量和服务多样性的不断增长的需求，以及支持提供这些服务的基础设施的日益复杂和异质性，对目前的通信网络管理方法提出了重大挑战。特别是，对于网络管理系统来说，保持计算/网络资源和正在运行的服务的状态及其相互依赖的完整和易处理的图景变得越来越困难，这反过来又使得实现最佳性能变得困难。这项提议旨在改变信息和通信技术网络的管理概念化方式，方法是在最近用于研究大脑的神经科学范式的启发下，对信息和通信技术组成部分之间新出现的依赖关系进行数据驱动的表征，并允许捕捉跨层和进程的复杂和不断变化的互动的功能影响并采取行动。通过将网络操作员从人工干预和/或手动应用领域的专业知识中解放出来，这项研究为开发能够扩大到未来信息和通信技术基础设施的规模、异质性和复杂性的自动化进程铺平了道路。

The ever-increasing demand in traffic and diversity of services, along with the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the infrastructure supporting their provision is presenting an important challenge to current approaches to the management of communication networks. In particular, it becomes increasingly difficult for network management systems to keep a complete and tractable picture of the state of computing/network resources and running services, and their interdependencies, which in turn makes it difficult to achieve optimal performance. This proposal aims to transform the way ICT networks are being conceptualised for management, by developing a data-driven characterisation of emerging dependencies between ICT components inspired by recent neuroscientific paradigms used to study the brain and allowing to capture and act upon the functional impact of complex and changing interactions across layers and processes. By releasing network operators from human intervention and/or manual application of domain expertise, this research paves the way for the development of automated processes that can scale up to the size, heterogeneity and complexity of future ICT infrastructures.