The Internet is becoming an immense organism of composite, highly distributed, pervasive, communication intensive services. For such a system to operate effectively, a ensible dialogue between users, services and the network components must proceed constantly based on mutual observation, self-observation, and adaptive and distributed feedback control. We review issues such as network "situational awareness", self-organisation, and structure, and relate these concepts to research on autonomic

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... munication systems. We discuss how this vision can benefit from techniques that have been experimented in the Cognitive Packet Network (CPN) test-bed at Imperial College, which dynamically routes traffic using on on-line monitoring, based on users' QoS needs and the network's objectives.