BIONETS: BIO-inspired NExt generaTion networkS

Abstract

Abstract. The amount of information in the new emerging all-embracing pervasive environments will be enormous. Current Internet protocol conceived almost forty years ago, were never planned for these emerging pervasive environments. The communications requirements placed by these protocols on the low cost sensor and tag nodes are in direct contradiction to the fundamental goals if these nodes, being small, inexpensive and maintenance free. This situation needs therefore a radically different approach to communication in these systems, especially since pervasive and ubiquitous networks are expected to be the key drivers of the all encompassing Internet of the coming decades. The fundamental disparity between the need for extremely dispensable, low cost devices, such as sensors or tags, and increasing communications load per device due to the presence of billions of nodes, that is creating an unbridgeable paradox, is therefore an insurmountable obstacle on the way to adoption when conventional networking architectures are being considered. Biological systems provide insights into principles which can be adopted to completely redefine the basic concepts of control, structure, interaction and function of the emerging pervasive environments. The study of the rules of genetics and evolution combined with mobility, leads to the definition of service oriented communication systems which are autonomous, and autonomously self-adaptive. The objective of this article is to ascertain how this paradigm shift, which views a network only as a randomly self-organizing by-product of a collection of self-optimizing services, may become the enabler of the new world of omnipresent low cost pervasive environments of the future.

Situated and autonomic communication an EC FET European initiative

“…The motivation for the BIONETS project [1] comes from emerging trends toward pervasive computing and communication environments, characterized by an extremely large number of networked embedded devices [2]. Such devices will possess sensing/identifying capabilities, making it possible for user-situated services to interface directly with the surrounding environment, entailing the possibility of introducing radically novel services, able to enhance our five sense, our communication and tool manipulation capabilities.…”

Proposal and evaluation of a future mobile network management mechanism with attractor selection

“…The articles by Dressler and Akan [12] and Meisel et al [13] provide good surveys for the large quantity of biologically inspired methods that are currently applied to networking problems. Investigated problems range from ant-based routing in mobile ad hoc networks [22], artificial immune systems for recovering from query losses in sensor networks [23], homeostatic regulation of the blood glucose level as IP resource self-management method [24] to entire architectures operating according to biological principles [25,26].…”

A taxonomy of biologically inspired research in computer networking

“…The BIONETS research project has similar goals and inspirations to the Bio-Networking Architecture project, but with a focus on pervasive computing rather than distributed Internet services [75,76]. The BIONETS project takes the biological organism analogy a step further by considering networks that can operate without global connectivity.…”