BISON: Biology-Inspired techniques for Self-Organization in dynamic Networks

Biology-Inspired techniques for Self-Organization in dynamic Networks (BISON) is a three-year Shared-Cost RTD Project (IST-2001-38923) funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the Information Society Technologies Programme of the European Commission. It runs from January 2003 until December 2005. The objective of BISON is the design and implementation of algorithms for management and control in modern network environments. These environments are typically large, complex, highly dynamic, and heterogeneous. To cope with these challenges, network algorithms should have fully distributed and self-organizing architectures, and be adaptive, robust, and scalable. The central claim of BISON is that the observation and analysis of complex adaptive systems found in Nature can be a major source of inspiration to design algorithms with such characteristics. In what follows, we first describe the objectives of the project. Then we present the specific classes of networks that have been investigated, and discuss some of the results obtained so far in conjunction with the biological mechanisms that have provided useful design guidelines. More details can be found at http://www.cs.unibo.it/bison.