Autonomous Networks, Consensus and Distributed Constraint Reasoning

Terabit scale networking requires better Consensus.

Autonomous Networks and Autonomic Networking can be renamed as solving Consensus Dynamics.

Wikipedia States (Nov’ 2018):

“Consensus dynamics or agreement dynamics is an area of research lying at the intersection of systems theory and graph theory. A major topic of investigation is the agreement or consensus problem in multi-agent systems that concerns processes by which a collection of interacting agents achieve a common goal. ”

To note again it is an ‘intersection of systems theory and graph theory’.

Lets not forget that mathematically communications networks are Graphs. An OSPF/ISIS network is a weighted directed graph where the costs & metrics are the weights, the network devices are vertices and the ethernet L2 links are directed edges.

Furthermore, to note again that ‘ a collection of interacting agents achieve a common goal’. In networks the common goal can be to enable end to end, host to host connectivity over a vast network. TCP and UDP.

Interesting times ahead for Terabit scale networks. Keeps the fun alive in network engineering.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_dynamics

Click to access EncyclopAI07.final.pdf