The Internet did transform from a scientific network for specialists into an ubiquitously used network that provides the basis for a growing number of applications. Among the issues of highest importance for the future evolution of communication networks are functional adaptability or extensibility and robustness against a wide range of possible faults and attacks.
Existing approaches for extending or adapting functionality, and for identifying sources for malfunctioning and faults (such as device failures, mis-configuration or attacks) typically require a significant amount of human intervention and are therefore slow, error-prone and expensive. For both areas, functional flexibility and fault management, a promising approach is to introduce self-organizing algorithms into the network that capable of autonomic behaviour, thereby providing some kind of intelligence that reduces the need of human intervention.
The term Autonomic Networking is used to describe communication networks consisting of self-managing elements capable to support self-configuration, self-healing and self-optimization. These desired properties require components for observation, for assessing the observed data, for representing and applying knowledge about constraints and goals. Due to the complexity of the network, and due to the multitude of administrative borders, decentralized self-organizing algorithms are required, with autonomous capabilities of individual nodes. The ultimate aim is to derive design paradigms for communication networks and distributed computing environments that are capable of providing rapidly adapting services and applications in scenarios where networked devices and users interact in a highly dynamic manner.
This seminar aims for building a scientific community by bringing together researchers and engineers who have gained experience in different emerging network technologies and related fields such as self-organization and peer-to-peer networking, network tomography and measurements, autonomic computing, organic computing and bio-inspired techniques, active and programmable networking, and service creation and management.
The seminar aims for identifying common research challenges and for discussing potential solutions. As an outcome of this seminar, synergies and open issues among different areas will be identified, allowing to better align research in the different communities.

Areas of interest include:

• Theoretical foundations for networks with autonomic elements
• Tools and techniques for designing, analyzing and building autonomic networks and systems
• Network monitoring and measurements for self-managing networks and systems
• Adaptive security and safety mechanisms for self-protection and self-healing of networks and systems
• Advanced information processing techniques for autonomic networking and self-organization, in particular statistical and optimization techniques, policy-based techniques, context-awareness, algorithms from control theory, machine learning, knowledge-based and goal-driven role-based mechanisms
• Models suitable for autonomic networking, including models from related disciplines such as models for automation and control, models of biological systems, or models of economic systems
• Languages, development and securely programmable environments for autonomic communications systems
• Applications and example scenarios
• Human interaction with autonomic networks and systems

Seminar organization

The seminar will consist of individual presentations and an extensive set of group work, consisting of break-out sessions and plenary sessions in which results from individual groups are presented and discussed. Prior to the seminar, the participants are requested to provide an extended abstract on their talk. These abstracts will be used to structure the sessions with individual talks. The following aspects are of particular interest: pointing out current problems and promising directions, describing synergies, competitions and weaknesses of the different research areas mentioned in the description of the seminar topic, and identifying development perspectives, potential and recommendations for further research. As one outcome of the seminar, it is planned to edit a seminar report, with contributions from the abstracts, the presentations and the result of the group work during the seminar. This summary report would combine the most important issues with relevance for the future that will be identified in the workshop.