iNetLab: A Model-Driven Development and Performance Engineering Environment for Autonomic Network Applications

A key software engineering challenge in autonomic computing is the complexity of administrating operational policies of applications. In order to address this challenge, this paper proposes and evaluates a new development environment, called iNetLab, which is designed to improve the productivity of designing, maintaining and tuning operational policies in autonomic network applications. iNetLab consists of a set of visual modeling languages specialized to define operational policies in network applications, a set of supporting facilities for those modeling languages, and tools estimates the performance of a network application with its operational policy under development.