BIONETS : Bio-Inspired paradigms for service provisioning in pervasive computing environments

Recent advances in microelectronics, communications and software engineering are converging to enable the deployment of smart environments, i.e., systems characterized by a sheer number of digital objects with sensing/identifying capabilities, which can be used to collect information about the environment and pave the way to the introduction of context-aware services. These systems broadly referred to as pervasive computing environments, pose three main challenges to conventional networking and service provisioning paradigms: scalability, heterogeneity and complexity. BIONETS represents an effort to overcome such limitations by drawing inspiration from biological and socio-economical systems, which have been shown to be able to successfully support similar scale and complexity figures. In particular, BIONETS targets the introduction of services able to possess self-evolutionary features, i.e., able to react in an autonomic way to the environmental features and the users needs in order to develop new, unplanned functionalities. In BIONETS, the services are also responsible for creating, when and where needed, an ad hoc networking support, based on localized peer-to-peer interactions among the nodes taking part in the system. In this chapter, we will depict the general BIONETS framework, with a specific focus on the service architectural features. We will then introduce and describe the BIONETS service life-cycle, and detail some of the early results obtained by the project consortium partners.