August 15, 2006
[ return to the news list ]
IST Results (05/26/06)
As today's computer networks are beginning to strain under the weight of their own complexity, researchers working under the auspices of the IST-funded BISON program are looking to natural evolutionary processes for clues on how to handle the burden. "Complexity in computing is already a problem, and traditional methods are no longer adequate to address the problems," said Ozalp Babaoglu, BISON coordinator and a computer science professor at the University of Bologna. "And it's going to get worse as the Internet becomes increasingly complex. Biological systems, on the other hand, are incredibly resilient and amazingly robust, so we're taking inspiration from a system that we know works." The BISON project researchers created a load-balancing protocol to prove the viability of their modular approach. Having successfully created a technique for preventing any one node from being overwhelmed with traffic, the researchers hope that others will pursue similar projects. Babaoglu says the load balancing protocol is based on negative chemotaxis, a technique for prompting data to spontaneously disseminate across a network. The project focused on adaptive routing and radio power management to address the problem of a fluid topology in ad hoc networks. Nodes enter and exit the network, and the risk of running out of signal power threatens the connectedness of the entire network. The researchers employed the computer scheme Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), inspired by the way ants always find the shortest path to food. BISON's AdHocNet attempted to create an ACO routing algorithm to find the most efficient traffic pattern for data while also conserving energy. The researchers also looked to the way fireflies emit light as the basis for a synchronicity protocol that Babaoglu says could eventually become the core of the Internet.
For the complete article, see http://istresults.cordis.lu/index.cfm/section/news/tpl/article/BrowsingType/Features/ID/82144
Posted by rab5 at 09:40 PM
[ return to the news list ]
