Guest editorial bio-inspired networking

521 echnology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at multiple scales, from the global Internet scale down to micro-and nano-devices. Many of these devices are highly mobile and autonomous, and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally distributed and unsupervised way. fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized computing systems, which are capable of operating under changing environments, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under unpredictable operating constraints, such as traffic demand, energy consumption, size, and processing power. These systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen scenarios, as well as to display desired emergent properties. Biological systems are able to handle such challenges with an efficiency far beyond current human artifacts. Based on this observation, recently a number of approaches inspired by biological mechanisms and phenomena have been proposed as a strategy to handle the complexity of massively distributed systems such as the Internet, or wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. The goal of such bio-inspired approaches is to discover and to enhance methods for engineering technical solutions presenting a similar high stability and efficiency as biological entities often have. In the last few years, especially the networking and communication areas benefited from bio-inspired research solutions. As the existing research shows, bio-inspired approaches are a fruitful direction in networking and communications. This JSAC special issue highlights the latest achievements in this new research domain, emphasizing different approaches as learned from the biological world and applied to the development of human artifacts. In particular, this special issue focus-es on methodologies used to identify relevant biological mechanisms , the modeling of these mechanisms, and their application to artificial technical solutions. In the context of this JSAC special issue, we considered all techniques with direct biological background including animal learning strategies, self-organizing methods as observed from swarms down to nano-structures observed and analyzed in molecular biology. In response to our call for papers, we received papers studying a wide variety of problems in networking based on biologically-inspired solutions. In particular, the following areas have been investigated: epidemics, ant colony optimization and swarm intelligence, pulse coupled oscillators, population dynamics, and nano-communication. In the paper " Modeling Broadcasting Using Omnidirectional and Directional Antenna in Delay Tolerant Networks as an Epidemic Dynamic, " the authors study broadcasting of …