Autonomic networking systems dynamically adapt the services and resources that they provide to meet the changing needs of users and/or in response to changing environmental conditions. This paper presents a novel policy-based, context-aware, service management framework for ensuring the efficient delivery and management of next generation services using autonomic computing principles. The novelty of this approach is its use of contextual information to drive policy-based changes that adapt

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... rk services and resources. Policies control the deployment and management of services and resources, as well as the software used to create, manage, and destroy these services and resources. Policies also control the distribution and deployment of the necessary components for fully managing the service lifecycle, and provide the efficiency and scalability necessary for supporting autonomic systems.