  Agile recovery from link failures in autonomic communication networks is
essential to increase robustness, accessibility, and reliability of data
transmission. However, this must be done with the least amount of protection
resources, while using simple management plane functionality. Recently, network
coding has been proposed as a solution to provide agile and cost efficient
network self-healing against link failures, in a manner that does not require
data rerouting, packet retransmission, or failure localization, hence leading
to simple control and management planes. To achieve this, separate paths have
to be provisioned to carry encoded packets, hence requiring either the addition
of extra links, or reserving some of the resources for this purpose.
  In this paper we introduce autonomic self-healing strategies for autonomic
networks in order to protect against link failures. The strategies are based on
network coding and reduced capacity, which is a technique that we call network
protection codes (NPC). In these strategies, an autonomic network is able to
provide self-healing from various network failures affecting network operation.
The techniques improve service and enhance reliability of autonomic
communication.
  Network protection codes are extended to provide self-healing from multiple
link failures in autonomic networks. We provide implementation aspects of the
proposed strategies. We present bounds and network protection code
constructions. Finally, we study the construction of such codes over the binary
field. The paper also develops an Integer Linear Program formulation to
evaluate the cost of provisioning connections using the proposed strategies.
