Bio-inspired Networking

Abstract

The natural world is enormous, dynamic, incredibly diverse, and highly complex. Despite the inherent challenges of surviving in such a world, biological organisms evolve, self-organize, self-repair, navigate, and flourish. Generally, they do so with only local knowledge and without any centralized control.

Our computer networks are increasingly facing similar challenges as they grow larger in size, but are yet to be able to achieve the same level of robustness and adaptability.

Many research efforts have recognized these parallels and wondered if there are some lessons to be learned from biological systems. Here we show how biological concepts have been most successfully applied. Also, we conclude that research efforts are most successful when they separate biological design from biological implementation – i,e. when they extract the principles from the former without imposing the limitations of the latter.