The evolution of the Internet reveals surprising turns and obstacles. Centralized approaches of introducing new services and architectures consistently failed to materialize at large scale. Quality of Service, group communication, or mobility support are only some examples for the difficulty with orchestrated approaches. The success story of the Internet, on the other hand, is strongly linked to decentralization.

Robustness to failures or flexibility in introducing new applications such as the World Wide Web or Peer-to-Peer systems have been key momentum to technological advancements and economics. Future networks are envisioned to be highly complex and difficult to manage due to heterogeneity of networks, spontaneous set-up of networks, and the envisioned number of interconnected devices, appliances, and artifacts. The question that poses itself is whether self-organization can be exploited to a larger scale for solving some of the pending problems for such future networks. Self-organization may even play a key architectural role of the future Internet for enhanced flexibility and evolvability.

It is the goal of the IWSOS workshop series to bring together leading international and multi-disciplinary researchers to create a visionary forum for investigating the potentials in self-organization and the means to achieve it.

IWSOS Workshops: