The BISON Project (Research Outlook)

Modern distributed information systems are gaining an increasing importance in our every day lives. As access to networked applications become omnipresent through PC’s, hand-held and wireless devices, more and more economical, social and cultural transactions are becoming dependent on the reliability and availability of distributed applications. As a consequence of the increasing demands placed by users upon networked environments, the complexity of modern distributed systems has reached a level that puts them beyond our ability to deploy, manage and keep functioning correctly through traditional techniques. Part of the problem is due to the sheer size that these systems may reach, with millions of users and interconnected devices. The other aspect of the problem is due to the extremely complex interactions that may result among components even when their numbers are modest. Our current understanding of these systems is such that minor perturbations (e.g., a software upgrade, a failure) in some remote corner of the system will often have unforeseen, and at times catastrophic, global repercussions. In addition to being fragile, many situations (e.g., adding/removing components) arising from their highly dynamic environments require manual intervention to keep information systems functioning. In order to deal with the scale and dynamism that characterize modern distributed systems, we believe that a paradigm shift is required that includes self-organization, adaptation and resilience as intrinsic properties rather than as afterthought. For this reason, we have started BISON (Biology-Inspired techniques for Self Organization in dynamic Networks), an international project partially funded by the European Commission. BISON draws inspiration from natural and biological processes to devise appropriate techniques and tools to achieve the proposed paradigm shift and to enable the construction of robust and self-organizing distributed systems for deployment in highly dynamic modern network environments.