Bio-inspired routing strategies for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Successful behavioural and communication strategies of biotic communities can serve as an inspiration for algorithms used to design, manage, and control real-world networks. Many natural systems exhibit complex yet efficient behaviours. Some animal communities display sophisticated behavioural patterns arising from fairly simple activities of theirmembers. The behaviours of ant colonies, swarms of bees, schools of fish, and even some human communities, can be seen as properties of distributed systems consisting of individual agents performing straightforward actions and communicating using simple strategies. Formally, the behaviour of such communities can be modelled as a massive yet intuitive multiagent system. The ensuing models can be applied to a variety of networking problems. This chapter looks at routing inwireless sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks as tasks that bear similarities to communication in biotic societies and swarms, and underlines the role of propagation phenomena in routing. It summarizes the basic principles of swarm intelligence and evolutionary computing and reviews recent advances in biologically-inspired network routing.