We believe that the future networks, which will be orders of magnitude more complex and larger than current networks, should exhibit self-organization with inherent support for scalability, adaptability to environmental changes in networks, and survivability/availability from massive failures and attacks. The Bio-Networking Architecture is motivated by the observation that these desirable properties (such as scalability, adaptability and survivability/availability) have already been realized in various biological systems, and it applies key biological principles and mechanisms for designing network applications. The Bio-Networking Architecture is a new framework for developing large-scale, highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic network applications.
In the Bio-Networking Architecture, a network application is implemented as a decentralized collection of autonomous objects called cyber-entities. This is analogous to a bee colony (a network application) consisting of multiple bees (cyber-entities). Each cyber-entity implements a functional component related to their service or application, and follows simple behavior rules (e.g., replication, reproduction and migration) similar to biological entities. Cyber-entities store and expend energy for living. They gain energy in exchange for providing their services, and expend energy for performing their biological behaviors, invoking other cyber-entities' services and utilizing resources (e.g. CPU cycles and memory space).
The Bio-Networking platform is a middleware system that provides reusable components for deploying and executing cyber-entities (CEs). These components abstract low-level operating and networking details (e.g. I/O, concurrency, messaging and network connection management) and provide a series of runtime services that cyber-entities frequently use for performing their services and invoking their biological behaviors.
The architecture of the Bio-Networking platform is organized as shown below:
Cyber-entities run on a Bio-Networking platform and use services provided by the Bio-Networking platform for performing its services and invoking its behaviors (e.g. discovery, replication and migration). The CE context is an entry point for a cyber-entity to access Bionet services. It examines if a Bionet service requested by a cyber-entity is available on the Bio-Networking platform, and if it is, it obtains a reference to the requested Bionet service. The CE context is created and associated with each cyber-entity implicitly (automatically), when a cyber-entity is created, replicated, reproduced or migrated from another host.
Please see the following materials for general overviews of the Bio-Networking Architecture and Bio-Networking platform.