The term bio-inspired has been introduced to
demonstrate the strong relation between a particular system or algorithm, which
has been proposed to solve a specific problem, and a biological system, which
follows a similar procedure or has similar capabilities. In the last 15 years,
we have witnessed unprecedented growth of the Internet. Moreover, the Internet
continues to evolve at a rapid pace in order to utilize the latest technological
advances and meet new usage demands. It has been a great research challenge to
find an effective means to influence its future and to address a number of
important issues facing the Internet today, such as overall system security,
routing scalability, effective mobility support for large numbers of moving
components and the various demands put on the network by the ever-increasing
number of new applications and devices.
Although the Internet
is perhaps the world‟s newest large-scale, complex system, it is
certainly not the first nor the only one. Certainly, the most commonly known
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, increasing complexity as
the system grows in size, and the interaction of a large number of individual,
self governing components. Despite their disparate origins (one made by nature,
the other made by man), it is easy to draw analogies between these two systems.
so, there is a great opportunity to find solutions in biology that can be
applied to problems in networking. As a result of millions of years of
evolution, biological systems and processes have intrinsic appealing
characteristics. They are
• adaptive to the
varying environmental circumstances,
• robust and
resilient to the failures caused by internal or external factors,
• able to achieve
complex behaviors on the basis of a usually limited set of basic rules,
• able to learn and
evolve itself when new conditions are applied,
• effective
management of constrained resources with an apparently global intelligence
larger than the superposition of individuals,
• able to
self-organize in a fully distributed fashion,
• collaboratively
achieving efficient equilibrium,
• survivable despite
harsh environmental conditions due to its inherent and sufficient redundancy.
The common rational
behind this effort is to capture the governing dynamics and understand the
fundamentals of biological systems in order to devise new methodologies and
tools for designing and managing communication systems and information networks
that are inherently adaptive to dynamic environments, heterogeneous, scalable,
self-organizing, and evolvable.
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