A Self-Organization Approach to Dependable Information Infrastructure

摘要

Information infrastructures such as Internet and Computational Grids have enabled a networked computing and communication environment. Although many organizations depend on network-centric information operations to support critical missions, existing information infrastructures provide little guarantee in dependability of network-centric computing and communication. This paper discusses problems with dependability of existing information infrastructures, such as the stateless or centralized resource management. A Complex Adaptive Systems approach to dependability of information infrastructures based on bottom-up self-organization is then presented with emphasis on the detection of emergent states, and the self-synchronized control of information infrastructures in response to emergent states. Existing information infrastructures such as Internet and Computational Grids provide little guarantees in dependability of networked computing and communication. Internet supports the sharing of computational resources on the network based on the "best-effort" model in which trust among participating parties is all but assumed. That is, participant A will satisfy the need of other participants as long as the current capacity of participant A's computational resources can still satisfy the need. Hence, resources are made available for use by anyone regardless of the state of resources until resources are completely depleted. This "best-effort" model has provided an environment for craft exploits and denial-of-service attacks that have happened and have presented a significant threat to the realm of information superiority. For example, if a malicious hacker sends large amounts of data in a very short period of time to a router covering a certain sector of an information infrastructure, the router keeps filling up its queue with incoming data streams until its queue is full and no other data streams can be accepted and routed, causing a denial-of-service attack. Moreover, quality of service (QoS) for a user's application is not guaranteed because other users may emerge at any time to compete for and share computational resources. Therefore, little resource management and QoS guarantees exist in Internet for dependable information operations on the network.