Rethinking large-scale network management through the lens of neuroscience

The ever-increasing demand in traffic and diversity of services, along with the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the infrastructure supporting their provision is presenting an important challenge to current approaches to the management of communication networks. In particular, it becomes increasingly difficult for network management systems to keep a complete and tractable picture of the state of computing/network resources and running services, and their interdependencies, which in turn makes it difficult to achieve optimal performance. This proposal aims to transform the way ICT networks are being conceptualised for management, by developing a data-driven characterisation of emerging dependencies between ICT components inspired by recent neuroscientific paradigms used to study the brain and allowing to capture and act upon the functional impact of complex and changing interactions across layers and processes. By releasing network operators from human intervention and/or manual application of domain expertise, this research paves the way for the development of automated processes that can scale up to the size, heterogeneity and complexity of future ICT infrastructures.