New paradigms for communication/networking systems are needed in order to tackle such emerging issues as heterogeneity, complexity and management of evolvable infrastructures, thus requiring approaches that are both task- and knowledge-driven. The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies and devices in a dynamically changing environment poses many challenges to the research community, including interoperability, programmability, management, openness, reliability, performance, context awareness, intelligence, autonomy, security, privacy, safety, and semantics. Inspired by biological systems, autonomic communication envisions communication systems that can organize, configure, optimize, protect, and heal themselves with minimal involvement of human administrators.

"New paradigms for communication/networking systems are needed in order to tackle the emerging issues such as heterogeneity, complexity and management of evolvable infrastructures. In order to realize such advanced systems, approaches should become task- and knowledge-driven, enabling a service-oriented, requirement, and trust-driven development of communication networks. The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies and devices in a dynamically changing environment poses many challenges to the research community, including interoperability, programmability, management, openness, reliability, performance, context awareness, intelligence, autonomy, security, privacy, safety, and semantics.This edited volume explores the challenges of technologies to realize the vision where devices and applications seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate, and autonomously manage themselves, and as a result, the borders of virtual and real world vanish or become significantly blurred."

Bio-inspired Autonomic Structures: a middleware for Telecommunications Ecosystems.- Social-based Autonomic Routing In Opportunistic Networks.- A Collaborative Knowledge Plane for Autonomic Networks.- A Rate Feedback Predictive Control Scheme Based on Neural Network and Control Theory for Autonomic Communication.- Hovering Information - Self Organizing Information That Finds Its Own Storage.- The CASCADAS Framework for Autonomic Communications.- Autonomic Middleware for Automotive Embedded Systems.- Social Opportunistic Computing: Design for Autonomic User-Centric Systems.- Programming and Validation Techniques for Reliable Goal-driven Autonomic Software.- Autonomic Communication in Pervasive Multimodal Multimedia Computing Systems.- Self-healing for Autonomic Pervasive Computing.- Map-based Design for Autonomic Wireless Sensor Networks.- An Efficient, Scalable and Robust P2P Overlay for Autonomic Communication.- Autonomic and Coevolutionary Sensor Networking.