[nmrg] Comments on autonomic use cases

[Joe Marcus Clarke <[e-mail]>]

After listening to the talks today, I have an overall comment related to 
network traceability in an autonomic environment.  I was very intrigued 
by Laurent's talk as I have been doing work in this area using Cisco 
embedded automation.  I strongly feel that we should be doing more 
autonomic cross-device analysis of problem conditions to do smart 
rerouting in the case of instability.  For example, in addition to local 
factors like temperature and load, we could look at path or hop 
stability in terms of dropped packets along a flow, jitter, latency, 
etc. and determine a new optimum/stable path.

Additionally, with respect to the troubleshooting section in 
draft-jiang-nmrg-an-gap-analysis-00, I think there is something that can 
be done autonomically relating to hardware failure.  Given Laurent's 
ideas again, a device that can detect imminent failure (e.g., SMART-like 
operations on harddrives), and make proactive changes to the network to 
reroute around an impending hardware failure until humans can get 
involved.  This can prevent extended outages.  Perhaps this is something 
that could supplement this section of text.

Joe