BIONETS: BIO-inspired NExt generaTion networks

The amount of information in the new emerging all-embracing pervasive environments will be enormous. Current Internet protocol conceived almost forty years ago, were never planned for these emerging pervasive environments. The communications requirements placed by these protocols on the low cost sensor and tag nodes are in direct contradiction to the fundamental goals if these nodes, being small, inexpensive and maintenance free. This situation needs therefore a radically different approach to communication in these systems, especially since pervasive and ubiquitous networks are expected to be the key drivers of the all encompassing Internet of the coming decades. The fundamental disparity between the need for extremely dispensable, low cost devices, such as sensors or tags, and increasing communications load per device due to the presence of billions of nodes, that is creating an unbridgeable paradox, is therefore an insurmountable obstacle on the way to adoption when conventional networking architectures are being considered. Biological systems provide insights into principles which can be adopted to completely redefine the basic concepts of control, structure, interaction and function of the emerging pervasive environments. The study of the rules of genetics and evolution combined with mobility, leads to the definition of service oriented communication systems which are autonomous, and autonomously self-adaptive. The objective of this article is to ascertain how this paradigm shift, which views a network only as a randomly self-organizing by-product of a collection of self-optimizing services, may become the enabler of the new world of omnipresent low cost pervasive environments of the future.