Autonomic Principles of IP Operations and Management

th This volume presents the proceedings of the 6 IEEE International Workshop on IP Operations and Management (IPOM 2006), which was held as part of Manweek 2006 rd th in Dublin, Ireland from October 23 to 25 , 2006. In line with its reputation as one ofthe pre-eminent venues for the discussion and debate of advances of management of IP networks and services, the 2006 iteration of IPOM brought together an international audience of researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia. The overall theme of Manweek 2006 was ¿Autonomic Component and System Management¿,with IPOM taking this to be the application of autonomic principles to the IP operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) domain. IPOM 2006 is more relevant than ever to the emerging communications infrastr- ture that is increasingly focused on ¿convergence¿ of networks and services. Although arguably over-hyped, there is a fundamental truth to this convergence story, and this is based on the fact that the TCP/IP protocol suite (IPv4 and IPv6) has become the common denominator for a plethora of such converged services. One good example in the period between IPOM 2005 and IPOM 2006 has been the large scale deployment of consumer VoIP, linked to the success of Skype and alternatives including SIP-based approaches. In many countries VoIP is driving broadband deployment for SMEs where real costs savings can be accrued, especially for companies with remote staff in the ?eld.