An Introduction to the Book Titled “ Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic Computing and Networking : Specification , Development and Verification ”

Received on 12 December 2014, published on 16 December 2014 Copyright © 2014 Phan Cong Vinh, licensed to ICST. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/casa.1.2.e6


Introduction
A new computing and networking paradigm is currently on the spot as one of the priority research areas and its research activities are booming recently: autonomic computing and networking (ACN), which are inspired by the human autonomic nervous system.ACN are characterized by their self-* facets such as selforganization, self-configuration, self-healing, selfoptimization, self-protection and so on whose contextawareness used to dynamically control computing and networking functions.
The overarching goal of ACN is to realize computing and networking systems, that can manage themselves without direct human interventions.Meeting this grand challenge of ACN requires a rigorous approach to ACN and the notion of self-*.To this end, taking advantage of formal methods we establish, in this book, formal and practical aspects of ACN through specifying, refining, programming and verifying ACN and their self-*.All of these are to achieve foundations and practice of ACN.
From the above characteristics, novel approaches of specification, refinement, programming and verification are arising in formal methods for ACN.Therefore, new methodologies, programming models, tools and techniques are imperative to deal with the impact of ACN and their self-* mentioned above on emerging computing and networking systems.
This book [1] is preferred to be a reference material for readers who already have a basic understanding of ACN and are now ready to know how to specify, develop and verify ACN using rigorous approaches.Hence, the book includes both theoretical contributions and reports on applications.For keeping a reasonable trade-off between theoretical and practical issues, a careful selection of the chapters was completed, on the one hand, to cover a broad spectrum of formal and practical aspects and, on the other hand, to achieve as much as possible a selfcontained book.
Formal and practical aspects will be presented in a straightforward fashion by discussing in detail the necessary components and briefly touching on the more advanced components.This book, with chapters contributed by prominent researchers from academia and industry, will serve as a technical guide and reference material for researchers, scientists, professionals and students in computer science and computer engineering as well as developers and practitioners in computing and networking systems design by providing them with state-of-the-art research findings and future opportunities and trends.These contributions include formal approaches and applications in ACN.In particular, the book covers existing and emerging research issues in the formal methods for ACN.
The book has 13 chapters organized into two sections.First section contains six chapters addressing formal and practical aspects of autonomic computing.Second section consists of seven chapters presenting formal and practical aspects of autonomic networking.

Part 1: Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic Computing
This section includes Chapters 1-6 and covers various topics on formal and practical aspects of autonomic computing.
Chapter Chapter 6 by L. Ferariu et al. discusses the features of genetic programming based identification approaches.In the context of complex identification problems, genetic programming brings some important benefits which basically refer to its inherent capacity of self-organizing the models, without restrictive working hypothesis.

Part 2: Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic Networking
This section consists of Chapters 7-13 with a focus on formal and practical aspects of autonomic networking and communications.
Chapter 7 by P.C. Vinh is a reference material for readers who already have a basic understanding of the mobile environments (MEs) for their applications and are now ready to know how to specify and verify formally aspectoriented self-configuring P2P networking (ASPN) in MEs using categorical language, assured that their computing needs are handled correctly and efficiently.ASPN  An Introduction to the Book Titled "Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic Computing and Networking: Specification, Development and Verification" 3 Chapter 9 by C.S. Sahin et al. presents a topology control mechanism based on genetic algorithms (GAs) within a mobile ad hoc network (MANET).Formal and practical aspects of convergence properties of the force-based genetic algorithm, called FGA, are discussed.Within this framework, FGA is used as a decentralized topology control mechanism among active running software agents to achieve a uniform spread of autonomous mobile nodes over an unknown geographical terrain.FGA can be treated as a dynamical system in order to provide formalism to study its convergence trajectory in the space of possible populations.
Chapter 10 by V. Vlassov et al. introduces Niche, a general-purpose distributed component management system used to develop, deploy and execute selfmanaging distributed applications.Niche consists of both a component-based programming model as well as a distributed runtime environment.It is especially designed for complex distributed applications that run and manage themselves in dynamic and volatile environments.
Chapter 11 by G. Rétvári et al. presents a practical guideline for building truly autonomic systems.This idea is demonstrated by an example of building advanced selfadaptive routing mechanisms on top of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol.
Chapter 12 by J. Antoniou addresses enhanced Session Management (SM) for multiparty communications, i.e. how to setup and modify a multi-party session that may respond to context changes and adapt to satisfy the users of a service group.By using the users' situation information, i.e. environment and network context, the chapter illustrates ways to provide more accurate sessions for mobile communities.
Chapter 13 by U. Mir provides an overview of using multiagent systems over cognitive radio networks for dynamic spectrum sharing.In this work, avoiding unnecessary spectrum wastage problem requires performing the sharing and allocation functions opportunistically.In accordance to developing spectrum sharing solutions where the cognitive radio nodes can work collectively, a comprehensive study of utilizing multiagent systems over cognitive radio networks is discussed..

Remarkable Features of the Book
This book has the following remarkable features:  Provides a comprehensive reference on formal and practical aspects of ACN. Presents state-of-the-art formal and practical aspects of ACN. Formally specifies, develops and verifies ACN. Includes illustrative figures facilitating easy reading. Discusses emerging trends and open research problems in the formal methods for ACN.
The book serves as a comprehensive and essential reference on ACN and is intended as a textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate-level courses.It can also be used as a supplementary textbook for undergraduate courses.The book is a useful resource for the students and researchers to learn ACN.In addition, it will be valuable to professionals from both the academia and industry and generally serves instant appeal to the people who would like to contribute to ACN technologies.

Reviews and Testimonials
"This book will usefully serve as a technical guide and reference material for computer science and computer engineering researchers and scientists as well as designers and developers in computing and networking systems by providing them with state-of-the-art research results and future opportunities and trends.To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book that presents achievements and findings of ACN research covering the full spectrum of formalizing ACN.These make the book unique and, in more than one respect, a truly valuable source of information that may be considered a landmark in the progress of ACN." -Dr.M. Bakhouya, Aalto University, Finland