Towards Self-Destructing Networks

I am attending the Dagstuhl Seminar on the Management of the Future Internet and as some of you might know, I also love to create new terms when I go to this kind of events. (I somehow believe that for many hype terms, the words have been found before they were given an interpretation.) While sitting in the wine cellar, I heard my mouth suddenly saying “self-destructing networks” and so I started to think what this could possibly mean.

As a researcher of the 21st century, I asked Google and found web pages about self-destructing emails (quite useful I would say) and some pages about self-destructing MP3 files. If we consider Van Jacobsen’s Content-centric Networking idea a possible model for the Future Internet, then (Content) Self-Destructing Networks might not be a far fetched idea.

While preparing my five minute position statement the next day and while others were discussing the usual philosophical questions such as “what is network management?” or “what is the difference between management and control?” or “can autonomous management ever be achieved?”, I suddenly realized that self-destructing networks are simply a special form of self-* (self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, …) networks. This is a surprising result since I assume that many people (including myself until very recently) are not aware that self-destructing networks are a part of self-* networks. In fact, one might argue that the orchestration (in the past I would have written combination but I am trying to use the language of the day) of a larger number of self-* techniques inevitably must lead to self-destructing networks.

During the rest of the Dagstuhl meeting, the term self-destructing networks came up again and again and perhaps I should consider organizing the 1st International Workshop of Self-Destructing Networks.