SGER: Exploratory Research on A New Survivable, Scalable, and Self-Adapting Network Architecture Based on Biological Concepts

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The Bio-Networking Architecture that the PI proposes in this project is inspired by the observation that the biological world has already developed the mechanisms necessary to achieve such key requirements for the Next Generation Internet (NGI) as scalability, heterogeneity and dynamicity, security, survivability, and simplicity. In the biological world, each individual entity (e.g., a bee in a bee colony) follows a simple set ofbehavior rules (e.g., migration, reproduction, energy exchange, mutation, and death), yet a group of entities (e.g. a bee colony) exhibits complex, emergent behavior (e.g., adaptation, evolution, security, urvivability).Therefore, if services and applications adopt biological concepts and mechanisms, they too may be able to achieve the key requirements of NGI.The researcher proposes to apply key concepts and mechanisms from the biological world to design, implement, and empirically evaluate a new network architecture called the Bio-Networking Architecture. In the Bio-Networking Architecture, services and applications are implemented by a collection of multiple entities called cyberentities (as a bee colony consists of multiple bees). These cyberentities have functionality related to their service or application and follow simple behavior rules (e.g., migration, reproduction, energy exchange, mutation, death) similar to biological entities. In the Bio-Networking Architecture, useful emergent behaviors (e.g., adaptation, evolution, security, and survivability) result when individual cyberentities interact. The Bio-Networking Architecture can be applied to a variety ofNGI applications and services, including information dissemination, data storage, resource discovery, or public key infrastructure.The innovative claims of the proposed project are: The proposed Bio-Networking Architecture is the first attempt to apply the biological concepts of emergent behavior, autonomous control, and adaptation and evolution to a broad and general class of network services and applications. Previous studies of biological architectures were for the purpose of understanding biological processes, simulating life or emergent behavior, distributed computation, or robotics. The Bio-Networking Architecture enables the construction of services and applications which meet the key requirements of NGI. Scalability is achieved because cyberentities act autonomously, and on a local basis using only local information. Construction of the service or application is simplified because only relatively simple behaviors at the cyberentity level need to be designed. The other requirements of adaptation, security, and survivability are simply the emergent behavior of the cyberentities interacting as a whole. Services and applications designed using the Bio-Networking Architecture adapt to heterogeneous and dynamically changing network conditions through the autonomous actions of their cyberentities, each exhibiting simple behaviors. They also evolve to more desirable behaviors through the mutation and natural selection mechanisms of the Bio-Networking Architecture. Current network services must be manually configured and optimized to network conditions. The Bio-Networking Architecture has features which can be used as additional layers of defense against attacks. Services and applications can use, in addition to traditional security techniques such as authentication and encryption, features of Bio-Networking Architecture such as intrusion detection, autonomous replication, algorithmic diversity, and dispersion of the cyberentities, as additional layers. These features increase the probability that the service or application can detect, survive, and recover from coordinated attacks by insiders, terrorists, or nations. Current network services and applications have only one layer of defense, so they are unlikely to survive a coordinated attack.