The motivation for BIONETS comes from emerging trends towards pervasive computing and communication environments, where myriads of networked devices with very different features will enhance our five senses, our communication and tool manipulation capabilities. The complexity of such environments will not be far from that of biological organisms, ecosystems, and socio-economic communities.
Description
BIONETS was completed as an European Union project and consisted of 16 partners from 10 countries. The acronym stands for “BIOlogically-inspired autonomic NETworks and Services”. The project addressed challenges such as dealing with a huge number of nodes including low-cost sensing/identifying devices, a wide heterogeneity in node capabilities, high node mobility, the management complexity and the possibility of exploiting spare node resources.
We sought inspiration from natural and society systems to provide a fully integrated network and service environment that scales to large amounts of heterogeneous devices, and that is able to adapt and evolve in an autonomic way. BIONETS overcomes device heterogeneity and achieves scalability via an autonomic and localized peer-to-peer communication paradigm. Services in BIONETS are also autonomic, and evolve to adapt to the surrounding environment. Biologically-inspired concepts permeate the network and its services, blending them together, so that the network moulds itself to the services it runs. This new paradigm breaks the barrier between service providers and users, and sets up the opportunity for “mushrooming” of spontaneous services, therefore paving the way to a service-centric ICT revolution.
At BME MEDIANETS we have been developing data dissemination algorithms for multihop broadcast. Moreover, we have been looking at genetic algorithms and evolutionary programming languages in the context of Bionets.
Information
Duration: 2006.01.01. – 2009.12.31.
Funding: 5 050 000 EUR
Source of funding: EC-FP6
Project homepage: http://bionets.eu