Applying biological principles to designs of network services

Abstract

This paper describes application of key biological principles and mechanisms to the design of network services. In biological systems, an individual entity (e.g., a bee in a bee colony) follows a simple set of behavior policies (e.g., migration, replication, death), yet a group of entities (e.g., a bee colony) exhibits complex emergent behavior with useful properties such as scalability and adaptability. Analogous to the biological systems, in the biologically inspired networking architecture that we present in this paper, a group of autonomous agents that implement simple behavior policies collectively provide a network service. We believe if a network service is modeled after biological principles and mechanisms, the network service is able to meet key requirements such as scalability, adaptability, survivability, simplicity and autonomy. This paper discusses key biological principles that can be applied to the design of network services, and demonstrates through simulations how network services built based on biological principles evolve to improve service performance.