Bio-Networking Architecture:
An Approach to Leverage Super Distributed
Object Environment using Biological Concepts and
Mechanism
Jun Suzuki and Tatsuya Suda
jsuzuki@ics.uci.edu
Dept. of Information and Computer Science,
University of California, Irvine
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Agenda
Motivation to the Bio-Networking
Architecture
Bio-Networking Platform Design
Current Project Status and Future Work
Conclusion
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Motivation: Bio-Networking
Architecture
The explosive growth of the net places larger
and more challenging demands on underlying
communication software.
Future network services and applications have
to satisfy:




Scalability
Adaptability
Availability and Survivability
Autonomy, with minimum human configuration
Networks need to have built-in mechanisms to
provide these features

large nets: beyond one’s capability to design
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Observation
Observation:

large scale biological systems scale, adapt, and
survive
 e.g. bee colony
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Our Approach
Our approach: Bio-Networking Architecture

apply biological concepts/mechanisms to future
network services and applications
 emergent behavior out of simple behaviors
 life cycle
 energy gain/consumption/exchange replication (with
mutation), reproduction (with cross over)
 adaptation and evolution through species diversity
and natural selection
 decentralized discovery through social networking
and pheromone emission.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Emergent Behavior
Biological systems


consist of many autonomous entities
Useful group behavior emerges from autonomous
local interaction of individuals with simple
behaviors.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bio-Networking Architecture

individuals = cyber-entities (objects/agents)
 abstractions of various system components (users,
resources and service components)
 An application is constructed from a collection of
cyber-entities.

Cyber-entities
 is autonomous with simple biological behaviors
 e.g. migration, replication, reproduction, death,
energy exchange, relationship establishment,
pheromone emission
 makes its own decision according to its own
behavioral policy.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Cyber-entity Example Behaviors
Energy exchange




biological entities naturally strive to gain energy by
seeking and consuming food
cyber-entity stores/expends energy (food/money)
Energy is the unit of exchange for service or
resource usages.
energy exchange
 CE gains energy from a user/another CE in exchange
for performing a service
 CE expend energy to use network/computing
resources

energy used as a natural selection mechanism
 abundance induces replication or reproduction
 scarcity induces
death
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Cyber-entity Example Behaviors
(cont’d)
relationship establishment


a cyber-entity knows something (e.g., name,
address, service type) about another cyber-entity
relationship can be used to group cyber-entities
collectively providing a service
application constructed from a collection of cyberentities
 e.g., a web server (application) from a collection of
web pages (cyber-entities

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Evolution and Adaptation
Biological systems


the biological system adjusts itself for
environmental changes of long-term and short-term.
key enablers:
 species diversity from mutations and crossovers
during replication/reproduction
 natural selection keeps entities with beneficial
features alive and increase reproduction probability
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bio-Networking Architecture


cyber-entities (CEs) evolve, adapt, and localize
through diversity and natural selection
diversity
 A CE behavior can be implemented by a number of
algorithms/policies
 human designers can introduce diversity in CEs
 CEs replicate/reproduce with mutation/crossover

natural selection
 death from energy starvation
 replication/reproduction from energy abundance
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Research Vision
No central or coordinating entity exists.

Autonomous decentralized system in mind
A large number of CEs created by billions of Internet
users, autonomously behaving
CEs contacting other CEs providing related services,
making relationship,
diverse behavior policies getting created, good
behaviors survive, bad ones die, making system
flexible, adaptable and evolvable
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Agenda
Bio-Networking Architecture Overview



Motivation to Bionet Project
Observations of large scale biological systems that
scale, adapt, and survive in dynamic environment
How bio concepts are used in the Bionet project
Bio-Networking Platform Design
Current Project Status and Future Work
Conclusion
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bio-Networking Platform
(Bionet Platform)
CE
CE
CE
CE
CE Context
Bionet Services
Bionet Container
Bionet Platform
Java VM
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bio-Networking
Architecture Components
Bio-Networking Architecture consists of



Cyber entity
Cyber entity context
Bionet platform
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Cyber-entity
A cyber entity (CE)



is the smallest component to create an application
(network service).
provides a simple service, replicates, reproduces,
moves and dies autonomously.
communicates with each other using FIPA ACL.
 in both synchronous and asynchronous manner

is a CORBA object with mobility.
 IIOP is a message transport for ACL.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Cyber-entity Context
CE Context


is used to find available Bionet services.
is created and associated with each CE implicitly by
Bionet platform (Bionet Lifecycle service), when a
CE is created, replicated, reproduced, or migrated
from another host.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Platform
Bionet Platform

runs on a Java virtual machine.
Bionet Platform consists of 2 components:

Bionet Services
 provides a set of general-purpose runtime services
that are frequently used for deploying and running
CEs.

Bionet Container
 provides the bottom most operations to maintain
Bionet platform.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Services
Bionet Services
Energy
Management
Relationship
Management
Pheromone
Emission
Social
Networking
Cyber Entity
Migration
Directory
Resource
Sensing
Resource
Allocation
Lifecycle
Communication
Security
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Life Cycle Service
Life Cycle service


manages life cycle of cyber-entities.
provides the operations of
 initialization
 activation
 deactivation
 destroy
 replication
 Mutation might occur
 reproduction
 with crossover
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Energy Mgt. Service
Energy is a unit of exchange for a service
provided by another CE and for the resources
the CE uses.
Bionet Energy Management service


manages the energy level of CEs.
checks if a CE has enough energy when it migrates,
replicates and reproduces.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Resource Sensing Service
Resource Sensing Service senses



Types, amount and costs of resources available on a
local Bionet platform
neighboring Bionet platforms reachable with n hops
Types, amounts and costs of resources available on
neighboring platforms
Supported types of resource


Physical resources: CPU time and memory space
Logical resources: threads and transport
connections
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Resource Allocation Service
Resource allocation service allocates
physical/logical resources to a CE.
It requires a CE to pay energy for allocated
resources.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Relationship Mgt. Service
Relationship is used to

Find other cyber-entities.
 Bionet platform does not assume any centralized
directory that knows all the CEs.

Group cyber-entities collectively providing a
service.
 An application is constructed from a collection of
CEs.
Every CE finds others via its relationships.

Each cyber-entity has zero or more relationships.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Relationship Management service


establishes, inspects, update, and destroys relationships
between CEs.
Updates relationship strength.
customer
A CE arranging
a travel plan
maven
Hotel reservation CE
CE
CE
service provider
consumer
partner
service provider
Flight reservation CE
CE
A CE arranging
a travel plan
CE
CE
acquaintance
partner
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
Hotel room whole seller CE
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The relationship strength is not fixed but changed
dynamically.


The decreases by a certain amount in every certain period.
When the strength of a relationship becomes 0, Relationship
Management service destroys the relationship.
Relationship Management service provides the policies
on how strength is increased.




how many messages are exchanged between two CEs
how much data is transferred between two CEs
how much energy gets exchanged
CE selects which policy to use.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Social Networking Service
Human society: “six degrees of separation”
concept


network of family and friend relationships results in
any two humans being separated by at most six
relationships
A asks his friends to find B; friends of A ask their
friends to find B; etc.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Social Networking service allows cyber-entities
to discover another cyber-entity on remote
platform.
Discovery is through relationships between
cyber-entities.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Bionet Container
Bionet Container

provides the bottom most operations to maintain
Bionet Platform.
 CE registration/unregistration
 CE activation/deactivation
 resource management
 CE reference management
 request/event parsing
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Agenda
Motivation to Bio-Networking Architecture
Bio-Networking Platform Design
Current Project Status and Future Work
Conclusion
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Current Project Status
Development of Bionet Simulator


Simulation study of adaptation to changes of
network environment
Simulation study of evolution of cyber-entities
Development of Bionet platform
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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An Ongoing project:
Self-Organizing Agents
It has been one of the biggest problem in traditional
distributed object computing environments to decide and
optimize object locations.

Static and manual configuration in the environment without object
mobility
 e.g. Many objects on a powerful machine
 Frequently interacting objects on the same host/process


Tedious and time-consuming
The system/object should be stopped; availability decreased.
The decision is ad-hoc or static even in mobile agent
environments.

e.g. Developers define an agent itinerary that describes when and
where to move at development time.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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We need more dynamic and autonomous
mechanism of deciding agent location.


Bionet facilitates this by using self-organizing cyber
entities
A CE organization is emerged from autonomous local
interactions.
 Energy exchange between CEs
 Energy exchange between an CE and its platform
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Agent-agent/agent-platform
interactions
Energy in Bionet

Unit of exchange for service or resource usages
Agent-agent interaction

Each agent gains energy from another agent (or user) in
exchange for performing a service.
 abundance induces replication or reproduction
 scarcity induces death
Agent-platform interaction

Each agent expends energy to use network/computing
resources.
 e.g. thread, transport connection, memory space and CPU
cycle

Agent platform knows the types, amount and cost of
available resources.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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An Example Scenario
CE
(1) registers
(2) assigns an idle thread
(3) requires the cost
Each agent asks its underlying platform to
assign a thread, and pays its energy.
The unit cost of a thread utilization may
vary with the number of available threads.

More idle threads exist in a pool, cheaper the
unit cost is.
Each agent behaves autonomously with its
policies.

agent registration table
Thread pool
Bionet Container

e.g. An agent migrates to another host when
migration cost is cheaper than thread
utilization cost.
e.g. An agent deactivates itself when its
thread utilization cost is too expensive to pay.
The concept of energy allows agents to
consume available resources in a distributed
environment effectively.
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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Wrap up
Bionet provides a new paradigm to build network
services and applications.

Inspired by biology
Bionet Platform is in design/early implementation
stages

Most of the elements are in place
Several simulation results have supported our
direction.
Bionet Simulator is available at

http://netresearch.ics.uci.edu/bionet/
OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb. 2001
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