n the Future Internet most services will be delivered with end-to-end quality of service (QoS), security and reliabili- ty constraints, and it will be of crucial importance to have secure, reliable, scalable and efficient mechanisms to facilitate the cooperation of networks to support these types of services. Self-management of networks deals with the ever increas- ing complexity of the associated processes. The grounds of self-management systems are contained in the IBM mani- festo [1], which describes a self-managed system including the necessary components for collecting data relevant to the system environment, and for reacting to keep the system in a desirable state. However, this paradigm does not consider the particularities of emerging network management. Indeed, in networking, a number of management systems have to coexist performing different management tasks covering var- ious nodes, links, and services. In addition, the existence of several management standards and protocols makes the problem of network management much more complex than a single isolated system. As it is not practical to devise a single autonomic control loop that deals with all the functional aspects involved in network management, it will be necessary to envisage a scenario where multiple specialized control loops will coexist and be responsible for the global network behavior. This was one of the challenges faced by the EU IST AUTOI (Autonomic Internet) Project [2], where a new concept, the Orchestration Plane (OP), was introduced to act as a media- tor among several Autonomic Management Systems (AMSs). The OP is an effective solution to deal with management domain heterogeneity and integration of several AMSs that would not be able to interoperate without a set of translation, negotiation, federation, and deployment functions. A key mediation role of the OP takes place at epoch of the coalition formation, where complex services will be composed from other available services offered by the AMSs. As the AMSs involved in a coalition can belong to different adminis- trative domains (most probably competitors), they will try to implement coalition strategies aligned to their own self-inter- ests. This motivates the need for a well-defined, functional, scalable Orchestration Protocol supporting such coalition for- mations among AMSs. This article describes an Orchestration Protocol for self- interested collaborative AMSs that provide support for the coalition formation process in federated networks. The novel- ty resides in the proposition of a service-centric protocol that supports coalition formation processes to address multiple simultaneous objectives, where AMSs compete to work in the most appropriate service coalition, according to their self- interests. In this article we first describe the framework of this work. We then describe the protocol, followed by experimental results. Finally, we provide the related work and conclusions, respectively. AutoI Orchestration Framework Autonomic Internet (AutoI) The Autonomic Internet (AutoI) solution [2] suggests a tran- sition from a service agnostic Internet to a service-aware net- work, managing network resources by applying autonomic principles. AutoI has developed a self-managing virtual net- IEEE Network • November/December 2011 16 0890-8044/11/$25.00 © 2011 IEEE I I Javier Rubio-Loyola, CINVESTAV Tamaulipas Carlos Mérida-Campos and Joan Serrat, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Daniel Fernandes Macedo, Federal University of Minas Gerais Steven Davy, Waterford Institute of Technology Zeinab Movahedi and Guy Pujolle, Laboratoire d’Informatique Paris 6 Abstract This article presents a service-centric orchestration protocol for self-interested auto- nomic management systems that supports the coalition formation process in large- scale collaborative and competitive environments. It supports environments in which coalition formations are carried out targeting multiple service requests at the same time, and in which the autonomic management systems compete to work in the most appropriate coalition. The protocol exploits the benefits of social networking in favor of manageability and scalability. Its performance is analyzed taking into account crucial aspects of self-organizing systems such as stability and conver- gence to optimal coalition formation results. A Service-Centric Orchestration Protocol for Self-Organizing Autonomic Management Systems