Bio-inspired ecosystems for telecommunications pervasive networks

An ecosystem is a biological environment inhabited by species, competing and cooperating for own benefits while conserving the environment. Actually, biological species achieve self-management through entirely fully distributed and emergent ways of processing knowledge. The adoption of ecosystem metaphors is a promising approach to drive the evolution of Telecommunications, IT and Internet. The reason behind this is that future networks complexity, dynamics, pervasiveness and adaptability will be comparable to that of natural complex ecological systems. Following this metaphor, one can easily imagine ecosystems of services spanning end-to-end across the network. Different actors of such ecosystems, such as Individuals, Enterprises, Service and Network Providers, will be able to share common environments in which they can interact in an open and collaborative way to produce/consume/sell/buy/trade data, contents, and application functions, by using the common resources in a sustainable way. The framework for the creation and governance of these service ecosystems has to address many challenges such as the increased complexity of large scale networks and their dynamic nature, resource constraints, heterogeneous architectures, absence or impracticality of centralized control and infrastructure, need for survivability, and seamless resolution of failures. These challenges have been successfully solved by Nature during millions of years of evolution. Therefore, biological solutions, which often operate within these complex adaptive scenarios, can be used as a source for deriving metaphors and algorithms applicable broadly in the field of pervasive service and network environments. This paper aims at describing how bio-inspired principles, such as autonomic control, grassroots emergence, or self-organization, and primitives, such as gossiping, or reactiondiffusion, can be injected on a simple computational model for distributed interacting systems to create and maintain in a sustainable way service ecosystems in pervasive context.