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

Abstract

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.