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:The Bio-Networking Architecture project is supported by National Science Foundation through grants ANI-0083074 and ANI-9903427, by Defence Advanced Research Program Agency through Grant MDA972-99-1-0007, by Air Force Office of Scientific Research through Grant MURI F49620-00-1-0330, and by grants from the University of California MICRO Program, Hitachi, Hitachi America, Novell, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), NTT Docomo, Fujitsu, and NS Solutions Corporation.We believe that large scale biological systems, such as the bee or ant colony, have already developed many of the mechanisms needed to satisfy these requirements. We have identified several key principles and mechanisms in these biological systems, and we are now applying them to the design of network services and applications.
- 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
Over millions of years of evolution, large scale biological systems, such as the bee or ant colony, have developed mechanisms that allow them to scale, adapt, and survive. Consider the bee colony. Bee colonies scale to a large number of bees because all activities of the hive are carried out without centralized control. Bees act autonomously, influenced by local conditions and local interactions with other bees. When building the hive, bees are guided only by the structure of the partially completed hexagonal cells around them. There is no master bee that controls the building of the hive. The bee colony also adapts to dynamic conditions, often to optimize its food gain relative to energy expenditure. When the amount of honey in the hive is low, a large number of food gathering bees leave the hive to gather nectar from the flowers in the area. When the hive is nearly full of honey, most bees remain in the hive and rest. The bee colony is survivable because it is not dependent on any single bee, not even the queen bee. Therefore, the colony can still survive after a predator kills a number of bees. In fact, the desirable characteristics of the bee colony, scalability, adaptability, and survivability, are not present in any single bee. Rather, they emerge from the collective actions and interactions of all the bees in the colony.
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. While the paradigm guides the design of a network application, the middleware aids the implementation the application by providing software components, namely cyber-entities and Bio-networking platforms. Cyber-entities are autonomous mobile agents that are used to implement network applications. Bio-networking platforms provide execution environments and support services for the cyber-entities.
Dept. of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
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