Benefits of Bio-inspired Technologies for Networked Embedded Systems: An Overview

The communication between networked embedded systems has become a major research domain in the communication networks area. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) and sensor/actuator networks (SANET) build of huge amounts of interacting nodes build the basis for this research. Issues such as mobility, network size, deployment density, and energy are the key factors for the development of new communication methodologies. Self-organization mechanisms promise to solve scalability problems – unfortunately, by decreasing the determinism and the controllability of the overall system. Self-Organization was first studied in nature and its design principles such as feedback loops and the behavior on local information have been adapted to technical systems. Bio-inspired networking is the keyword in the communications domain. In this paper, selected bio-inspired technologies and their applicability for sensor/actuator networks are discussed. This includes for example the artificial immune system, swarm intelligence, and the intercellular information exchange.