Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Managing ubiquitous communications and services
Venue: International Conference on Autonomic Computing (2009)

This volume presents the proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Managing Ubiquitous Communications and Services (MUCS 2009), which was held in Barcelona, Spain, 15th June 2009, as part of the 6th International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications -- ICAC 2009. The roots of the workshop series lie in the PRTLI3 M-Zones project, funded by the Irish Higher Education Authority, with three partners: The Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology, The Knowledge and Data Engineering Group at Trinity College Dublin, and The Adaptive Wireless Systems Group at the Cork Institute of Technology. The initial workshops in this series were held in Ireland, namely in Waterford and Dublin, 2003 and 2004. However as the workshop began to attract international participation and recognition, the steering committee decided to host the workshop in conjunction with major conferences that focus on important areas of interest to the community, starting in 2006 with the Pervasive Conference, in Germany 2007 in conjunction with IEEE/IFIP Integrated Management, and Brazil in 2008 as part of IEEE/IFIP Network and Operations Management (NOMS). As autonomic approaches are increasingly emerging as an important ingredient within ubiquitous communications and services, ICAC was chosen for this year's workshop. Ubiquitous / Pervasive Communications and Services present significant management challenges for the successful delivery of highly adaptive services across heterogeneous networks, middleware, applications and devices. Today's management systems are still unable to cope with the complexity, heterogeneity and automation required. To address these issues, new and innovative management solutions need to be realized. Such approaches need to support greater levels of autonomy within the management of systems, services and networks. However such new-style management needs to be informed by and operate within the scope of business, operational and environmental constraints and policies. A key element of greater acceptance and impact of pervasive management across application domains will be the degree of user empowerment they offer, balanced against the ever increasing need for greater management automation. The workshop provided a keynote presentation by Dr. Simon Dobson on the topic of ubiquitous autonomic management, who is uniquely positioned to provide insights having an extensive research track record in ubiquitous computing and autonomic computing areas. The keynote was followed by a single-track scientific programme featuring leaders in the research of ubiquitous communications and services management systems, and a panel discussion. In response to the call for papers, 21 submissions were received from three continents. All have been peer-reviewed, and 9 selected for full presentation at the conference, from 7 different countries. The topics presented in this workshop covered the areas of modelling and management architectures, design/planning/testing of systems and application development experiences. These topics provide both a unique insight into the current state of the art in ubiquitous management and suggest avenues for future research in this important research area.