Bio-inspired Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Bio-inspired network systems are a field of biology and computer science. These systems have gained importance in recent past for their tremendous amount of potential in solving many challenging networking issues. Bio-inspired systems take inspiration and develop model from biological organisms or biological systems. They not only offer a complete parallelism but also mimic the characteristics, laws, and dynamics between biological systems and network systems. Biological organisms have self-organizing and self-healing characteristics that help them in achieving complex tasks with much ease. Software-defined networking (SDN) provides a breakthrough in network transformation. It decouples the software from hardware firmware by disengaging the data plane and control plane of the networking device. Evolution of SDN in the current network scenario has enabled programmable networking that has provided a radical new way of networking. However, increasing network requirement and focus on the controller for determining the network functionality and resources allocations aims at self-management capabilities. The two systems, viz., SDN and biological organisms aim for self-organization and self-healing properties and thus, there exists a match between the two. The study provides a list of bio-inspired solutions in various issues of SDN.