Biology-Inspired techniques for Self-Organization in dynamic Networks

Introduction

BISON is a three-year Shared-Cost RTD Project (IST-2001-38923) funded by the Future & Emerging Technologies initiative of the Information Society Technologies Programme of the European Commission. The project runs from January 2003 until April 2006.

The complexity of modern Network Information Systems (NIS) has reached a level that puts them beyond our ability to deploy, manage and keep functioning correctly through traditional techniques. Part of the problem is due to the sheer size that these systems may reach with millions of users and millions of interconnected devices. The other aspect of the problem is due to the extremely complex interactions that may result among components even when their numbers are modest. Our current understanding of these systems is such that minor perturbations in some remote corner of the system will often have unforeseen, and at times catastrophic, global repercussions. In addition to being fragile, many situations arising from the highly dynamic environment in which they are deployed require manual intervention to keep NIS functioning.

What is required is a paradigm shift in confronting the complexity explosion problem to enable building robust NIS that are self-organizing and self-repairing. BISON draws inspiration from biological processes and mechanisms to develop techniques and tools for building robust, self-organizing and adaptive NIS as ensembles of autonomous agents. What renders this approach particularly attractive from a dynamic network perspective is that global properties like adaptation, self-organization and robustness are achieved without explicitly programming them into the individual artificial agents. Yet, given large ensembles of agents, the global behavior is surprisingly adaptive and can cope with arbitrary initial conditions, unforeseen scenarios, variations in the environment or presence of deviant agents. This represents a radical shift from traditional algorithmic techniques to that of obtaining the desired system properties as a result of emergent behavior that often involves evolution, adaptation, or learning.

Goals

BISON explores the use of ideas derived from complex adaptive systems (CAS) to enable the construction of robust and self-organizing information systems for deployment in highly dynamic network environments. We cast solutions to important problems arising in overlay networks and mobile ad-hoc networks as desirable global properties that systems should exhibit. We then search for CAS which can bring about these global properties.

A longer-term goal of BISON is to systematize this process --- to develop a coherent set of heuristics that can guide the search for CAS giving a desired global behavior.

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