From biology to evolve-able pervasive ICT systems
The emergence of future pervasive ICT environments, characterized by the massive proliferation of embedded electronic devices with communication and computing capabilities, are posing enormous challenges to existing approaches to networking, service provisioning and system management. In this paper, we make a case to go for biology as possible source of novel, revolutionary design patterns suitable to large-scale highly dynamic ICT systems. We also present a case study, the EU- funded BIONETS project, which tackles the increased complexity of large-scale ubiquitous systems by applying an evolutionary framework to the provisioning of pervasive services.
We present a scheme for implementing a version of task switching in engineered bacteria, based on the manipulation of plasmid copy numbers. Our method allows for the embeddingof multiple computations in a cellular population, whilst minimising resource usage inefficiency. We describe the results of computational simulations of our model, and discuss the potential for future work in this area.