A biologically-inspired MANET architecture

Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs), that do not rely on pre-existing infrastructure and that can adapt rapidly to changes in their environment, are coming into increasingly wide use in military applications. At the same time, the large computing power and memory available today even for small, mobile devices, allows us to build extremely large, sophisticated and complex networks. Such networks, however, and the software controlling them are potentially vulnerable to catastrophic failures because of their size and complexity. Biological networks have many of these same characteristics and are potentially subject to the same problems. But in successful organisms, these biological networks do in fact function well so that the organism can survive. In this paper, we present a MANET architecture developed based on a feature, called homeostasis, widely observed in biological networks but not ordinarily seen in computer networks. This feature allows the network to switch to an alternate mode of operation under stress or attack and then return to the original mode of operation after the problem has been resolved. We explore the potential benefits such an architecture has, principally in terms of the ability to survive radical changes in its environment using an illustrative example.