Bio-Networking Architecture Project

Michael Wang (mwang@ics.uci.edu), Prof. Tatsuya Suda (suda@ics.uci.edu)

The Bio-Networking Architecture project at U. C. Irvine is inspired by the
observation that the biological world has already developed
the mechanisms necessary to achieve the key requirements for next
generation gigabit networks, such as scalability, adaptability to
heterogeneous and dynamic conditions, security, survivability, and
simplicity.  In the biological world, each individual entity
(e.g. a bee in a bee colony) follows a simple set of behavior rules
(e.g. migration, reproduction, energy exchange, mutation, and death),
yet a group of entities (e.g. a bee colony) exhibits complex, emergent
behavior (e.g. adaptation, evolution, security, survivability).  Therefore,
if services and applications adopt biological concepts and mechanisms,
they too may be able to achieve the key requirements of next generation
gigabit networks.

In this project, we propose to apply key concepts and mechanisms from
the biological world and design and empirically evaluate a new network
architecture called the Bio-Networking Architecture.  In the Bio-Networking
Architecture, services and applications are implemented by a collection of
multiple entities called cyber-entities (analogous to a bee colony
consisting of multiple bees).  These cyber-entities have functionality
related to their service or application and follow simple behavior rules
(e.g., migration, reproduction, energy exchange, mutation, death) similar
to biological entities.  In the Bio-Networking Architecture, useful
emergent behaviors (e.g. adaptation, evolution, security, and survivability)
result when individual cyber-entities interact. 

The innovative claims of the proposed project are:

* The proposed Bio-Networking Architecture is the first attempt to apply
the biological concepts of emergent behavior, autonomous control, and
adaptation and evolution to a broad and general class of network
services and applications.  Previous studies of biological architectures
were for the purpose of understanding biological processes, simulating
life or emergent behavior, distributed computation, or robotics.

* The Bio-Networking Architecture enables the construction of services
and applications which meet the key requirements of next generation
gigabit networks.  Scalability is achieved because cyber-entities act
autonomously, and on a local basis using only local information.
Construction of the service or application is simplified because only
relatively simple behaviors at the cyber-entity level need to be designed.
The other requirements of adaptation, security, and survivability are simply
the emergent behavior of the cyber-entities acting collectively.

* Services and applications designed using the Bio-Networking Architecture
adapt to heterogeneous and dynamically changing network conditions through
the autonomous actions of their cyber-entities, each exhibiting simple
behaviors.  They also evolve to more desirable behaviors through the
mutation and natural selection mechanisms of the Bio-Networking
Architecture.  Current network services must be manually configured and
optimized to network conditions.

* Services and applications can use, in addition to traditional security
techniques such as authentication and encryption, features of Bio-Networking
Architecture such as autonomous replication, consistency checking,
algorithmic diversity, and dispersion of the cyber-entities, as additional
layers.  Current network services and applications have only one layer
of defense, and thus they are unlikely to survive coordinated attacks.