The 2nd prototype of ANA has been released. Check the download page here.

The ANA Project aims at exploring novel ways of organizing and using networks beyond legacy Internet technology. The ultimate goal is to design and develop a novel autonomic network architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomous formation of network nodes as well as whole networks. Universities and research institutes from Europe and Northern America are participating in this project.

The resulting autonomic network architecture will allow dynamic adaptation and re-organisation of the network according to the working, economical and social needs of the users. This is expected to be especially challenging in a mobile context where new resources become available dynamically, administrative domains change frequently, and the economic models may vary.

The scientific objective of this proposal is to identify fundamental autonomic network principles. Moreover, the ANA project will build, demonstrate, and test such an autonomic network architecture. The key attribute is that such a network scales in a functional way - that is, the network can extend both horizontally (more functionality) as well as vertically (different ways of integrating abundant functionality).

The challenge addressed in this project is to come up with a network architecture and to fill it with the functionality needed to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomic networking within the coming four years.