Exploiting bio-inspired approaches for the monitoring of pervasive environments

BioMPE (Bio-inspired Monitoring of Pervasive Environments) is a research project undertaken by the Pervasive and Artificial Intelligence research group at the Department of Informatics, University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The main goal of BioMPE is to build an intelligent and context-aware pervasive computing middleware to address the issues of reliability and dynamic adaptation of P2P overlays that are utilized to conduct monitoring over heterogeneous and ubiquitous networks. Drawing inspiration from nature and in particular from the behavior of ant colonies and swarm intelligence, we employ related selforganization techniques to construct reliable and robust P2P overlays. High-level policy-based management guides the operation and the possible need for adaptation of the monitoring task, in accordance to context information collected from the pervasive environment. In this respect, the key output of the project is the set of protocols, algorithms and mechanisms to enable the provision of reliable P2P overlay network monitoring, adaptation of which is guided by a pervasive computing middleware to reflect varying requirements.