Title
Design patterns from biology for distributed computing
Abstract
Recent developments in information technology have brought about important changes in distributed computing. New environments such as massively large-scale, wide-area computer networks and mobile ad hoc networks have emerged. Common characteristics of these environments include extreme dynamicity, unreliability, and large scale. Traditional approaches to designing distributed applications in these environments based on central control, small scale, or strong reliability assumptions are not suitable for exploiting their enormous potential. Based on the observation that living organisms can effectively organize large numbers of unreliable and dynamically-changing components (cells, molecules, individuals, etc.) into robust and adaptive structures, it has long been a research challenge to characterize the key ideas and mechanisms that make biological systems work and to apply them to distributed systems engineering. In this article we propose a conceptual framework that captures several basic biological processes in the form of a family of design patterns. Examples include plain diffusion, replication, chemotaxis, and stigmergy. We show through examples how to implement important functions for distributed computing based on these patterns. Using a common evaluation methodology, we show that our bio-inspired solutions have performance comparable to traditional, state-of-the-art solutions while they inherit desirable properties of biological systems including adaptivity and robustness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1145/1152934.1152937
TAAS
Keywords
Field
DocType
bio-inspiration,ad-hoc networks,distributed design patterns,peer-to-peer,self-&ast
Software design pattern,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
1
1
1556-4665
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
97
3.46
45
Authors
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ozalp Babaoglu11867135.64
Geoffrey Canright214110.13
Andreas Deutsch31035.74
Gianni A. Di Caro472151.79
Frederick Ducatelle581340.43
Luca Maria Gambardella67926726.40
Niloy Ganguly71306121.03
Márk Jelasity81732102.28
Roberto Montemanni964344.25
Alberto Montresor102301135.60
Tore Urnes1121014.13