The term “autonomic networking” refers to a recently emerged communications paradigm, that uses distributed techniques (swarm intelligence based methods) and distributed hash tables to implement traditional functionalities of networking, including among others routing, service and resource discovery, addressing, load balancing etc. The shift of interest towards the autonomic networking approach has been mainly motivated by the pervasion of novel algorithms into relevant fields of computer communication science. These innovative techniques have been greatly alleviated by their fusion with already established solutions and applications (i.e. agent-based systems, network middleware development etc) so as to form a new ever-evolving landscape in networking.
