Meeting Objectives: The 5^th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security (AIMS 2011) was hosted by ESIAL Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy 1, France, and supported by IFIP. Its main objective was to bring together academics from the senior level and Ph.D. students to discuss recent advances in those fields. The unique structure of AIMS in terms of a combination of teaching courses with a small theoretical and a large practical content, Ph.D. workshop sessions, and regular paper sessions complemented with a key note presentation reveals that the interaction between Ph.D. students and senior researchers can be implemented successfully.

 

In terms of major technical advances discussed, the following ones need to be named:

(a)   Intrusion detection and traffic measurements are closely related. Network forensics is becoming even more crucial due to the higher speeds of networks and larger amounts of data in transit.

(b)   The cloud computing-based network management supported by the Map-Reduce approach determines an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy path for application-specific tasks. Cloud SLAs can see a support of guarantee estimation means.

(c)    Network monitoring works for regular networks and shows with NetFlow as well as IPFIX that these are viable systems and protocols, however, modern very high-speeds and very heterogeneous networks’ support is not available by now.

(d)   Autonomic network and service management is algorithmically doable, though, challenging with respect trust mechanisms needed between components.  

(e)   Policy-based management has been studied for technical aspects for quite some time, the application of them in different domains and for pricing moves forward.

 

Furthermore, in terms of socio-economic facets, the situation reads as follows:

(a)  Network traffic analysis techniques need to keep up with higher network speeds and related accounting technologies face the tussle between providers’ analysis interests as well as users’ privacy interests. Furthermore, the social aspects of network usage become detectable, thus, trust and privacy issues arise.

(b)  Risk management of attacks in the operation of VoIP networks has been studied by econometric means and combines social and economic dimensions.

(c)  Autonomic network and service management is challenged by trust concerns and diverging business incentives, thus, reflecting stakeholder tussles in various applications. End-user experiences will increase and new business segments arise.

(d)  The combination of few input criteria with a set of competing stakeholders can result in a complex policy modeling and decision making, which grows in complexity due to the economic dimensions under consideration.

(e)  P2P systems and aggregation schemes have a high impact on socio-economic aspects, since a person-to-person communication without a central entity is feasible. The related change of the role for network providers leads to the need for new business models and appropriate incentives.