BIONETS Architecture: from Networks to SerWorks

Abstract

This paper presents the networking framework as conceived within the European project BIONETS. The case for such a framework comes from the idea of a "Disappearing Network" paradigm. In the disappearing network, the network ceases to exist as an independent entity and becomes an appendix of the distributed services running on user devices. The overall BIONETS system exploits the presence of embedded devices to provide context-awareness and leverages peer-topeer interactions among mobile devices in order to ensure system-wide dissemination of data and services. Some of the current networking solutions developed within the project are also presented, highlighting the use of bio-inspired techniques and tools. The paper presents then a first version of the SerWorks architecture, which takes a unifying view on networks and services. In SerWorks, the network becomes a set of particular services, aimed at general connectivity purposes, which can be created and modified at runtime in order to accommodate for specific system conditions and higher-level constraints.

Pre-deployment simulation evaluation of BIONETS, a new networking paradigm

“…This was based on OMNeT ++ [OMNeT++], a C++ simulation library. The focus of the simulator is the implementation of the networking functions of the SerWorks [3] architecture, which specifies a service oriented dynamically configurable networking solution. This module encapsulates all of the opportunistic networking and epidemic spreading related protocols, many of the security solutions, like trust and reputation management, fair exchange and barter based protocols.…”

A survey of autonomic computing methods in digital service ecosystems

“…• SAPERE [15][16][17][18][19][20] • CASCADAS [21][22][23] • BIONETS [24][25][26][27] • service reconfiguration for service ecosystems [80]. Figure 5 and Table 3 provide a comparison of these four primary methods.…”

“…The BIONETS (BIOlogically inspired autonomic NETworks and Services) project [24][25][26][27], which is a European Commission FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) initiative on Situated and Autonomic Communications, aims at enabling autonomic pervasive computing environments through the introduction of biologically inspired approaches. The project uses evolutionary techniques embedded in the system components as means to achieve full autonomic behavior.…”

“…In recent years, several methods and techniques have been proposed to exploit the benefits of the AC initiative in service-oriented ecosystems, for example, SAPERE [15][16][17][18][19][20], CASCADAS [21][22][23] and BIONETS [24][25][26][27]. However, very little work has applied the AC initiative in the DSEs domain [28][29][30].…”

Decentralized self-adaptation in large-scale distributed systems

“…The literature provides various approaches to deal with such systems. In particular, self-adaptation is addressed in various ways, ranging from centralized approaches [10,11,14], where one element is in charge and manage the others, to completely decentralised ones [6,12,17], where all elements are peers and the behaviour of the system emerges from the interaction of all the elements, through hierarchical approaches [4,5,15], where the elements are organised into a hierarchy. The great majority of studies on self-adaptive or autonomic systems have been evaluated through simulations or toy examples, without a complete empirical evaluation [18].…”