BIO INSPIRED NETWORKING

1. INTRODUCTION
In the last 15 years, we have witnessed unprecedented growth of the Internet. The tremendous size and complexity that is associated with any large-scale, distributed system is pushing the limits of our ability to manage the network, or even to fully understand its behavior. Moreover, the Internet continues to evolve at a rapid pace in order to utilize the latest technological advances and meet new usage demands. Although the Internet is perhaps the worlds newest large-scale, complex system, it is certainly not the first nor the only one. Certainly the oldest large-scale, complex systems are biological. Biological systems have been evolving over billions of years, adapting to an ever-changing environment. They share several fundamental properties with the Internet, such as the absence of centralized control, and the increasing complexity as the system grows in size, and the interaction of a large number of individual, self-governing components, just to name a few. As many researchers have argued there is a great opportunity to find solutions in biology that can be applied to problems in networking. In this report I present a survey of the bio-inspired networking and communication protocols and algorithms devised by looking at biology as a source of inspiration, and by mimicking the laws and dynamics governing these systems . .At the level of atoms and molecules, nanomachines can be considered as the most basic functional unit. Nanomachines are biological or artificial created nano-devices or components that are capable of performing only very simple tasks of computation, sensing, or actuation (e.g., detection of molecules, generation of motion, or performing chemical reactions) in its very close environment, because of their limited size and limited complexity. Hence, if multiple nanomachines communicate, they may execute collaborative and synchronous tasks in a distributed manner so further capabilities and applications will be enabled. Networked nanomachines may also cover larger areas, ranging from meters to kilometers, and expand the limited workspace of a single nanomachine which can only perform nano-scale objectives. Furthermore, if a large number of them cooperate, macro-scale tasks can be executed. However when deployed over broad areas, interaction with a specific nanomachine is ex-

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tremely difficult. Nanonetworks will provide the infrastructure and mechanism to enable that communication.

2. CHALLENGES IN NETWORKING
There exist many challenges for the realization of the existing and the next generation network architectures. At the same time, similar problems and their naturally evolved biological solution approaches also exist for these networking paradigms. Here we review the most challenging fundamental issues for networking and highlight the analogies with their counterparts and corresponding solution approaches which already exist in biological systems. Here instead of exploring networking problems in terms of functionalities and algorithms in each layer of communication protocol stacks for diverse set of network architectures, we overview the main common challenges of the existing and the next generation networks brought about by the evolution in communication technologies and the increasing demand posed upon them.

2.1 The Large Scale Networking

One of the main challenges is related to the sheer size exhibited by the networking systems, which connect huge numbers of users and devices in a single, omni-comprehen sive, and preferably always-on network. The first direct consequence of such large scales is the huge amount of traffic load to be incurred over the network. This could easily exceed the network capacity, and hence, hamper the communication reliability due to packet losses by both collisions in the local wireless channel as well as congestion along the path from the event field towards the sink. Consequently, the difficulty level for the selection of the appropriate set and number of nodes and their reporting frequency for reliable yet efficient client communication also increase with the network size. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) techniques provide efficient routing mechanisms for large-scale mobile ad hoc networks. In addition, information dissemination over large scales can be handled with the help of epidemic spreading which is the main transmission mechanism of viruses over the large and scale-free organism populations.

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2.2 Dynamic Nature

The existing network and the envisioned network architectures are highly dynamic in terms of node behaviors, traffic and bandwidth demand patterns, channel and network conditions. Dynamic spectrum access and its management in cognitive radio networks is another important case where the dynamic nature of the user behaviors, channel requests and application-specific bandwidth demands pose significant challenges in the network design. The objective of cognitive radio itself is to leverage the dynamic usage of spectrum resources in order to maximize the overall spectrum utilization. Communication techniques need to be adaptive to the dynamics of the specific networking environment. To this end, the biological systems and processes are known to be capable of adapting themselves to varying circumstances towards the survival. For example, Artificial Immune System (AIS), inspired by the principles and processes of the mammalian immune system, efficiently detects variations in the dynamic environment or deviations from the expected sys tem patterns. Similarly, activator-inhibitor systems and the analysis of reaction-diffusion mechanisms in biological systems also capture dynamics of the highly interacting systems through differential equations.

2.3 Resource Constraints

As the communication technologies evolve, demands posed upon the networks also drastically increase in terms of the set of available services, service quality including required bandwidth capacity, and network lifetime. For example, the current Internet can no longer respond to every demand as its capacity is almost exceeded by the total traffic created, which lays a basis for the development of next generation Internet. The biological systems yet again help researchers by providing pointers for mechanisms and solution approaches which address the trade-o between the high demand and limited supply of resources. For example, in the foraging process, ants use their individual limited resources towards optimizing the global behavior of colonies in order to find food source in a cost-effective way.

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2.4 Need for Infrastructure less and autonomous operation

With significant increase in network dimensions both spatially and in the number of nodes, centralized control of communication becomes unpractical. On the other hand, some networks are by definition free from infrastructure such as wireless ad hoc networks, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) , WSNs, and some have a heterogeneous, mostly distributed and non-unified system architecture such as cognitive radio networks, wireless mesh networks and WiMAX. These networking environments mandate for distributed communication and net- working algorithms which can effectively function without any help from a centralized unit. Hence, the existing and next generation information networks must have the capabilities of selforganization, self-evolution and survivability. Epidemic spreading mechanism could be modified for efficient information dissemination in highly partitioned networks and for opportunistic routing in delay tolerant networking environments. Ant colonies, and in general insect colonies, which perform global tasks with- out the control of any centralized entity, could also inspire the design of communication techniques for infrastructure- less networking environments. Furthermore, synchronization principles of fire flies could be applied to the design of time synchronization protocols as well as communication proto cols requiring precise time synchronization. The autonomous behavior of artificial immune systems may be a good mo del for the design of effective algorithms for unattended and autonomous communication in sensor networks.

2.5 Heterogeneous architecture

Next generation communication systems are generally en visioned to be composed of a vast class of communicating devices differing in their communication / storage / processing capabilities, ranging from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices and simple sensors to mobile vehicles equipped with broadband wireless access devices. For example, as one of the emerging and challenging future networking architectures, the Internet of things (IoT) is defined as a vision of network of objects which extends the Internet capabilities into our daily lives transforming our immediate environment into large-scale wireless networks of uniquely identifiable objects. Insect colonies are composed of individuals with different capabilities and abilities to respond to

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a certain environmental stimuli. Despite this inherent heterogeneity, colonies can globally optimize the task allocation and selection processes via their collective intelligence. Similar approaches can be adopted to address task assignment and selection in SANETs, for spectrum sharing in heterogeneous cognitive radio networks, as well as multi-path routing in overlay networks .

2.6 Communication on the micro level

With the advances in micro- and nano-technologies electro-mechanical devices have been downscaled to micro and nano levels. Consequently, there exist many micro(MEMS) and nanoelectro-mechanical systems (NEMS), and devices with a large spectrum of applications. Clearly, capabilities for communication and networking at micro even at nano scales become imperative in order to enable micro and nano devices to co operate and hence collaboratively realize certain common complex task which cannot be handled individually. In this regard, nanonetworks could be defined as a network composed of nano-scale machines, i.e., nano-machines, co operatively communicating with each other and sharing information in order to fulfill a common objective. Molecular communication provides important research directions and promising design approaches for communication and networking solutions at micro- and nano-scales.

3. STEPS TO ADAPT BIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS TO TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Before introducing the specific biological models that have been exploited towards the development and realization of bio-inspired networking solutions, we need to briefly study the general modeling approach. Many techniques are really bio-inspired as they follow principles that have been studied in nature and that promise positive effects items if applied to technical systems. Three steps can be identified that are always necessary for developing bio-inspired methods that have a remarkable impact in the domain under investigation: 1. Identification of analogies which structures and methods seem to be similar,

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2. Understanding detailed modeling of realistic bio- logical behavior, 3. Engineering model simplification and tuning for technical applications.

Identification of analogies between biology and ICT

Model Modeling of Understanding realistic biological Engineering simplification and tuning for ICT behavior applications

Fig x:

4. APPROACHES TO BIO-INSPIRED NETWORKING

In this section we introduce bio-inspired networking based on examples for the various network paradigms. The evidence certainly suggests that mother nature and network engineers have not only had to solve similar problems, but have also independently converged upon strikingly similar solutions. As such, it seems entirely reasonable that new or persistent problems in computer net works could have a lot in common with problems biology has encountered and resolved long ago. As computer net work researchers, it would serve us well to take a long, hard look at biological systems we may find more answers than we expect..

4.1

Swarm Intelligence and Social Insects

Collectively, insect societies can perform impressively complex tasks, such as nest building and food gathering. Individual insects function much like simple computing devices they execute simple procedures based on their input, causing them to produce some output. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is perhaps the best analyzed branch of swarm intelligence based algorithms. In general, swarm intelligence is based on the observation of the collective behavior of decentralized and self organized systems such as ant colonies, flocks of fishes, or swarms of bees or birds. In most cases, swarm intelligence based algorithms are inspired by the behavior of foraging ants. Ants are able to solve complex tasks by simple local means. Pheromone trails are used for efficient foraging. Ants perform a random search for food. The way back to the nest is marked with a pheromone trail. If successful, the ants return to the nest(following their wn trail). While returning, an extensive pheromone trail is produced pointing towards the food source.

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Further ants are recruited that follow the trail on the shortest path towards the food. The ants therefore communicate based on environmental changes (pheromone trail), i.e. they use stigmergic communication techniques for communication and collaboration. The most important aspect in this algorithm is the transition probability pij for an ant k to move from i to j. This probability represents the routing information for the exploring process. Each move depends on the following parameters:

Jki is the tabu list of not yet visited nodes, i.e. by exploiting Jki an ant k can avoid visiting a node i more than once. nij is the visibility of j when standing at I, i.e. the inverse of the distance. Tij is the pheromone level of edge(i,j), i.e. the learned desirability of choosing node j and current at node i. and are adjustable parameters that control the relative weight of the trail intensity T ij and the visibility nij respectively.

4.1.1 Recent Trends

ij (t ) ij k pij = [ il (t )] [ il ] k l J i 0

] [ ]

if j J ik otherwise

Two recent trends in social insect-inspired routing are applying ACO principles to routing in mobile, ad-hoc wireless networks (MANETs) and taking inspiration from insects other than ants.

4.1.2 Ongoing Work

As of the time of writing, some researchers are still developing new and improved ant-based routing algorithms for MANETs. One example is a new algorithm by Woo,et al., which is based on AntHocNet. This algorithm is intended to use significantly fewer forward and backward ants, thus improving efficiency. According to their simulations, this new algorithm does, in fact, have significantly less overhead than AntHocNet while maintaining comparable performance.

4.2

Firefly Synchronization
Precise synchronization in massively distributed systems is a complex issue and hard to achieve.

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Recently, new models for clock synchronization have been proposed based on synchronization principles of fireflies. Basically, firefly synchronization is based on the pulse coupled oscillators. The simple model for synchronous firing of biological oscillators consists of a population of identical integrate-and-fire oscillators. Multiple oscillators are assumed to interact inform of simple pulse coupling; when a given oscillator fires, it pulls the others up by a fixed amount , or brings them to the firing threshold, whichever is less. As a result, for almost all initial conditions the population evolves to a state in which all the oscillators are firing synchronously. The present concept of self-organized clock synchronization has been successfully applied to synchronization in ad hoc networks. Using a linearly incrementing phase function i, the local pulse of a node is controlled: when i reaches a threshold th , the local oscillator fires. For a period of T, this can be described as follows: d i(t)/dt = th/T

Fig x:Additional effort is needed to compensate the transmission delays in ad hoc and sensor networks. This can be done by selecting appropriate values for . In particular, the phase shift is dynamically updated according to the estimated transmission delay. Many other wireless networks, particularly sensor networks, require all of their sensors to perform actions that are coordinated in time. This may be simply to synchronize duty cycles to save power, or because the sensors are measuring time-sensitive events. This is an example of a problem nature has solved. The Mirollo and Strogatz model has some limitations when applied to real-world wireless networks. In particular, it assumes no propagation delays, no lossy links, and a fully connected

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network. Nevertheless, it has inspired a number of synchronization schemes for wireless networks. One of the earliest of these schemes was designed for ultra-wide bandwidth wireless networks where it is feasible for each node to hear every other node. This avoids one of the major limitations in applying the Mirollo and Strogatz model. The authors then modified the model to account for propagation delay and loss. Later work by Lucarelli and Wang extended this work, showing that, in theory, the modified Mirollo and Stro Researchers at Harvard University further extended this result into an actual protocol implementation for sensor networks. After some further modifications to the theoretical model, they initial results were inconclusive but promising. Upon further refinement, they were able to implement a TDMA protocol which significantly outperforms existing TDMA protocols for sensor networks, according to their evaluation.

4.3

Artificial Immune System

The term Artificial Immune System (AIS) refers to a terminology that refers to adaptive systems inspired by theoretical and experimental immunology with the goal of problem solving [66]. The primary goal of an AIS, which is inspired by the principles and processes of the mammalian immune system [25], is to efficiently detect changes in the environment or deviations from the normal system behavior in complex problems domains. Just as globalization has facilitated the spread of human disease, the interconnection of an increasing population of personal computers has enabled the spread of computer viruses on a global scale. This is a perfect example of a problem that was new to computer networks, but for which biology already had a solution: the immune system. An AIS basically consists of three parts, which have to be worked out in the immune engineering process: Representations of the system components, i.e. the mapping of technical components to antigens and antibodies. Affinity measures, i.e. mechanisms to evaluate interactions (e.g., stimulation pattern and fitness functions) and the matching of antigens and antibodies. Adaptation procedures to incorporate the systems dynamics, i.e. genetic selection.

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AIS has been designed to detect misbehavior in Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), a typical reactive MANET protocol. For the representation of routing events, letters from the alphabet are used, e.g. A=RREQ sent or E=RREQ received. Antibodies are represented as received sequences of such routing events. Then, a matching function can be defined using sequences of those letters, e.g. Gene 1=#E in sequence (refer to for more details). Then, the AIS is used to identify a node as suspicious if a corresponding antigen is matching any antibody. Furthermore, a no de is classified as misbehaving if the probability that the node is suspicious, estimated over a sufficiently large number of data sets, is above a threshold.

4.3.1 Recent Trends

Following more recent trends in networking research, AIS research has also made its way into MANETs and sensor networks in the form of misbehavior detection. In these environments, the fact that each no de could have an inexperienced or nonexistent administrator means that they may require automated methods for detecting and/or avoiding malfunctioning and malicious nodes. The other major, recent trend in AIS research is based on a relatively recent immunological theory called the danger theory . The danger theory proposes that the immune system does not, in fact, distinguish between the self and the foreign, but rather between the safe and the dangerous. Thus, the immune system may attack self cells that appear safe.

4.3.2 Ongoing Work

A more recent paper by Sarafijanovi c and Le Boudec proposes an AIS for collaborative spam filtering . In this scheme, each mail server runs an instance of the AIS, which generates signatures from e-mail messages using a novel technique. These signatures undergo negative selection, where signatures appearing in non-spam messages are removed. Different instances of the AIS, running on different servers, can exchange the signatures of high-volume spam messages that they have detected. The receiver treats these signatures as danger signals it uses them to trigger more intensive/active filtering, rather than simply assuming messages with these signatures are spam.

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4.4

Epidemic Spreading
Epidemic spreading is frequently used as an analogy to understand the information dissemination in wireless adhoc networks. Information dissemination in this context can refer to the distribution of information particles (as usually provided by ad hoc routing techniques) or to the spread of viruses in the Internet or on mobile devices. Biological models of virus transmission provide means for assessing such emerging threats and to understand epidemics as a general purpose communication mechanism. Two of the most common models, the susceptible-infective-susceptible (SIS) and susceptibleinfective-removed (SIR) models, have been used extensively by network researchers to model the spread of information in computer networks, and are therefore worth describing in some detail. In the SIS model, nodes are divided into two groups the susceptible group S and the infective group I. A node from the susceptible group S can acquire the infection from a node in the infective group I with some probability. This probability can be determined in any number of ways, as we will discuss in the following section. Once a node becomes infective, it can recover from the disease, but it does not acquire any immunity, meaning it moves back to the susceptible group S. The recovery time is a random number that follows a certain probability distribution based on the characteristics of the disease. When a node moves from the infective group I to the susceptible group S, it can once again contract the disease from any of the remaining nodes in the infective group I. Thus, nodes can repeatedly move from one group to the other, and, under the right conditions, the disease may never die out. In contrast, in the SIR model, a node cannot transition back and forth between the susceptible group S and the infective group I. Once a no de contracts the disease, it can recover from it, again after a random period of time. When a node recovers (or is removed from the population, e.g., through death), it moves to the removed group R and cannot contract the disease again. In addition, nodes in the susceptible group S cannot contract the disease from any of the nodes of the removed group R. Thus, in the SIR mo del, a disease will eventually die out, assuming the population of the nodes does not increase over time.

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4.4.1 Recent Trends

More recent work on computer viruses and worms has focused on detection and prevention, rather than modeling their spread. This work does not focus on epidemiological models, and it is therefore outside the scope of this survey.

4.5 .Nano Scale and Molecular Communication

Incredible improvements in the field of nano technologies have enabled nano-scale machines that promise new solutions for several applications in biomedical, industry and military fields. Some of these applications require or might exploit the potential advantages of communication and hence cooperative behavior of these nano-scale machines to achieve a common and challenging objective that exceeds the capabilities of a single device. At this point, the term nanonetworks is defined as a set of nano-scale devices, i.e., nano-machines, communicating with each other and sharing information to realize a common objective. Despite the similarity between communication and network functional requirements of traditional and nano-scale networks, nanonetworks bring a set of unique challenges. In general, nanomachines can be categorized into two types: one type mimics the existing electro-mechanical machines and the other type mimics nature-made nano-machins, e.g., molecular motors and receptors. The motivation behind nano-machines and nano-scale communications and networks have also originated and been inspired by the biological systems and processes. In fact, nanonetworks are significant and novel artifacts of bio-inspiration in terms of both their architectural elements, e.g., nano-machines, and their principle communication mechanism, i.e., molecular communication. Indeed, many biological entities in organisms have similar structures with nano-machines, i.e., cells, and similar interaction mechanism and vital processes, cellular signaling, with nanonetworks. Within cells of living organisms, nano-machines called molecular motors, such as dynein, myosin, realize intracellular communication through chemical energy transformation. Similarly, within a tissue, cells communicate with each other through the release over the surface and the diffusion of certain soluble molecules, and its reception as it binds to a specific receptor molecule on another cell.

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Apparently, cellular signaling networks are the fundamental source of inspiration for the design of nanonetworks. Therefore, the solution approaches for the commu nication and networking problems in nanonetworks may also be inspired by the similar biological processes. The main communication mechanism of cellular signaling is based on transmission and reception of certain type of molecules, i.e., molecular communication, which is, indeed, the most promising and explored communication mechanism for nanonetworks. First nanonetworks models are inspired by molecular communication schemes observed in biological systems. Biological nanonetworks are used for intra-cell, inter-cell and intra-specie communication. Intra-cell and inter-cell communication are referred as short-range techniques due to the size of the living cells and their internal components. Most of the intra-cell communication are based on molecular motors. Molecular motors e.g., dynein, are proteins or protein complexes that transform chemical energy into mechanical work at nano-scale their use as information shuttles or communication carriers for nano machines within a short range has been widely proposed. These molecular motors can be found in eukaryotic cells in living organisms.

5. Current Research Project in Bio-Inspired Networking 5.1 ANA: Autonomic Network Architecture (http://www.ana-project.org/)
The ANA Project aims at exploring novel ways of organizing and using networks beyond legacy Internet technology. The ultimate goal is to design and develop a novel autonomic network architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomous formation of network nodes as well as whole networks. Universities and research institutes from Europe and Northern America are participating in this project.

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The resulting autonomic network architecture will allow dynamic adaptation and re-organization of the network according to the working, economical and social needs of the users. This is expected to be especially challenging in a mobile context where new resources become available dynamically, administrative domains change frequently, and the economic models may vary. The challenge addressed in this project is to come up with network architecture and to fill it with the functionality needed to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomic networking within the coming years.

5.2 Bio-Networking Architecture(http://netresearch.ics.uci.edu/bionet)

It is not difficult to imagine a future where billions of people regularly access applications running inside the global network as part of their daily lives. To make this future a reality, network services and applications must satisfy the following requirements: they must be able to scale to billions of nodes and users they must be able to adapt to diverse and dynamic conditions in the network they must be secure and highly available they should require minimal human configuration and management

We believe that the challenges faced by future network applications have already been overcome in large scale biological systems and that future network applications will benefit by adopting key biological principles and mechanisms. The Bio-Networking Architecture is a paradigm as well as middleware for the design and implementation of scalable, adaptive, and survivable/available network applications. The paradigm is based on the principles and mechanisms that allow biological systems to scale, adapt, and survive.

6.3

Biologically

Inspired

Network

and

services

(http://www.bionets.eu/index.php?area=11)
The motivation for BIONETS comes from emerging trends towards pervasive computing and communication environments, where myriads of networked devices with very different features will enhance our five senses, our communication and tool manipulation capabilities. The complexity of such environments will not be far from that of biological organisms, ecosystems, and socio-economic communities. Traditional communication approaches are ineffective in this

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context, since they fail to address several new features: a huge number of nodes including lowcost sensing/identifying devices, a wide heterogeneity in node capabilities, high node mobility, the management complexity, the possibility of exploiting spare node resources. BIONETS aims at a novel approach able to address these challenges. Nature and society exhibit many instances of systems in which large populations are able to reach efficient equilibrium states and to develop effective collaboration and survival strategies, able to work in the absence of central control and to exploit local interactions. BIONETS overcomes device heterogeneity and achieves scalability via an autonomic and localized peer-to-peer communication paradigm. Services in BIONETS are also autonomic, and evolve to adapt to the surrounding environment, like living organisms evolve by natural selection.

6.4 CASCADAS (http://acetoolkit.sourceforge.net/cascadas)

Component-ware for Autonomic Situation-aware Communications, and Dynamically Adaptable Services (CASCADAS) main goal is developing an autonomic component-based framework to enable composition, execution and deployment of innovative services capable of flexing and coping with unpredictable environments by dynamically self-adapting to situation evolutions. In this context, CASCADAS aims at a vision of Future Internet as ecology of simple lightweight components (abstracting data, information, service components, telco-ICT enabler, etc.) that are able to interact with each other and self-organize dynamically their activities to serve in an adaptive and goal-oriented way the dynamic needs of users. In this vision, traditional ISO/OSI layered approaches to networking and Internet lose any meaning: i.e. without relying on any predefined layering, the ecology of self-organizing and self-adaptive components will be able to compose together any needed suite of services.

6.5 ECAGENTS: Embodied and Communication Agents

ECAgents is a project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community (IST-FET-1940). The aim of the project is the development of a new generation of embodied agents that are able to interact directly (i.e., without human intervention) with the physical world and to communicate between them and with other agents (including humans). This will be achieved through the development of new design principles, algorithms,

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and mechanisms that can extend the functionality of existing technological artefacts (mobile phone, WI-FI devices, robots and robot-like artefacts, etc.) and can lead to the development of new artefacts. The project aimed to develop concepts, tools, and models for analysing collections of both natural and artificial agents, and algorithms, definitions of dynamical systems, and performance analysis tools for designing artefacts that consist of evolving populations of interacting and communicating embodied agents. The project also aimed to investigate basic properties of different communication systems, from simple communication systems in animals to human language and technology-supported human communication, to clarify the nature of existing communications systems and to provide ideas for designing new technologies based on collections of embodied and communicating devices.

6.6 Molecular Communication (http://netresearch.ics.uci.edu/mc/mediawiki/index.php)

This research explores the possibility of molecular communication as a solution for communication between nanomachines. Nanomachines are artificial or biological nano-scale devices that perform simple computation, sensing, or actuation. Molecular communication provides a mechanism for nanomachines to communicate over a short distance (adjacent nanomachines to tens of micrometers) using molecules as a communication carrier. Current research focuses on understanding biological nanomachines and also on artificially creating counterparts of biological nanomachines. No current research focuses on communication aspects of nanomachines. Communicating nano machines can spur the creation of entirely new applications such as a nano-scale distributed computing system or a nano-scale sensing system. The class of molecular communication systems considered in this research consists of sender nanomachines, receiver nanomachines, carrier molecules, and the environment that these operate in. Senders and receivers include biological (such as cells) and biologically derived (such as molecular motors or sensors taken from biological systems) nanomachines that are capable of emitting and capturing carrier molecules (such as proteins, ions, or DNA). The environment is the aqueous solution that is typically found within and between cells.

6.7

Swarmnoid:

Towards

Humanoid

Robotic

Swarms
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(http:/www.swarmnoid.org)
The Swarmanoid project (IST-022888) is a Future and Emerging Technologies (FET-OPEN) project funded by the European Commission. The main scientific objective of this research project is the design, implementation and control of a novel distributed robotic system. The system will be made up of heterogeneous, dynamically connected, small autonomous robots. Collectively, these robots will form what we call a swarmanoid. The swarmanoid that we intend to build will be comprised of numerous (about 60) autonomous robots of three types: eye-bots, hand-bots, and foot-bots. The Swarmanoid project is the successor project to the Swarm-bots project, and will build on the results obtained during the Swarm-bots project.

6.8 Wasp (http://www.wasp-project.org)

The WASP project aims at narrowing this mismatch by covering the whole range from basic hardware, sensors, processor, communication, over the packaging of the nodes, the organisation of the nodes, towards the information distribution and a selection of applications. The emphasis in the project lays in the self-organisation and the services, which link the application to the sensor network. Research into the nodes themselves is needed because a strong link lies between the required flexibility and the hardware design. Research into the applications is necessary because the properties of the required service will influence the configuration of both sensor network and application for optimum efficiency and functionality. All inherent design decisions cannot be handled in isolation as they depend on the hardware costs involved in making a sensor and the market size for sensors of a given type.The general goal of the project is the provision of a complete system view for building large populations of collaborating objects. Project goal is to design and develop a novel autonomic network architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomous formation of network nodes. Universities and research institutes from Europe and Northern America are participating in this project. Goal of this project is to develop architecture such that they must be able to scale to billions of nodes and users they must be able to adapt to diverse and dynamic conditions in the network

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they must be secure and highly available they should require minimal human configuration and management

6. CONCLUSION
A great deal of successful research in the field of computer networks has been inspired by biological systems. Yet, we believe biologically inspired networking still has much room to grow. In particular, there are great opportunities in exploring a new approach. Observe some high-level behavior in nature which has a direct parallel to a desirable behavior for computer networks. Explore the basic biology of this behavior what individual components make up the system, the processes these components perform, what mathematical models have been used to describe this behavior and so on. Look for components, processes, or models that seem like they could map well to the computer networking domain. Turn these components, processes, or models into algorithms, new mathematical models, or software implementations. Generally attempt to stay as close as possible to the biological implementation. However, as others have recognized, the next generation of bio-inspired research will be most successful if it takes a more conceptual, systems-level approach. This means studying not just the behavior of individual components of the system, but their interactions, and the characteristics of the system that forms as a result. Approaches that too closely mimic the machinery of biological systems risk inheriting their quirks and constraints, imposed upon them by the randomness of evolution and the limits of the physical world. Therefore, the goal of bio-inspired research should be to find broader lessons and principles in the way large biological systems are built, then determine how to apply these lessons and principles to the design of networked systems. This goal requires a new high-level approach:

7. References
[1] Falko, Dressler, Ozgur B.Akan A survey on Bio Inspired Networking [2] Ian F.Akyildiz, Fernando Brunetti, Christina Blazquez Nanonetworks : A new communication paradigm.

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[3]

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