A taxonomy of biologically inspired research in computer networking

13 years 5 months ago

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The natural world is enormous, dynamic, incredibly diverse, and highly complex. Despite the inherent challenges of surviving in such a world, biological organisms evolve, self-organize, self-repair, navigate, and flourish. Generally, they do so with only local knowledge and without any centralized control. Our computer networks are increasingly facing similar challenges as they grow larger in size, but are yet to be able to achieve the same level of robustness and adaptability. Many research efforts have recognized these parallels, and wondered if there are some lessons to be learned from biological systems. As a result, biologically inspired research in computer networking is a quickly growing field. This article begins by exploring why biology and computer network research are such a natural match. We then present a broad overview of biologically inspired research, grouped by topic, and classified in two ways: by the biological field that inspired each topic, and by the area of netw...

Michael Meisel, Vasileios Pappas, Lixia Zhang

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