The biological immune system in our body is an efficient adaptive system. According to the immunologists, the components such as cells, molecules and organs in the biological immune system can prevent the body from being damaged by pathogens, known as antigens. The basic components of the immune system are lymphocytes that have two major types, B cells (B lymphocytes) and T cells (T lymphocytes). Biological immune systems are adaptive systems and their learning behaviors take place through evolutionary mechanisms similar to biological evolutions. They are distributed systems without central control. They can survive local failures and external attacks and maintain balance because of emergent behaviors of the interactions of many local elements, like immune cells. In the immune systems, the whole is more than the sum of the systems’ parts because of the interactions among the parts, just as emergent behaviors in other complex systems.
Published in Chapter:
Immune Based Bio-Network Architecture and its Simulation Platform for Future Internet
Yong-Sheng Ding (Ministry of Education, China), Xiang-Feng Zhang (Ministry of Education, China & Shanghai Dianji University, China), and Li-Hong Ren (Ministry of Education, China)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-310-4.ch010
Abstract
Future Internet should be capable of extensibility, survivability, mobility, and adaptability to the changes of different users and network environments, so it is necessary to optimize the current Internet architecture and its applications. Inspired by the resemble features between the immune systems and future Internet, the authors introduce some key principles and mechanisms of the immune systems to design a bio-network architecture to address the challenges of future Internet. In the bio-network architecture, network resources are represented by various bioentities, while complex services and application can be emerged from the interactions among bio-entities. Also, they develop a bio-network simulation platform which has the capability of service emergence, evolution, and so forth. The simulation platform can be used to simulate some complex services and applications for Internet or distributed network. The simulators with different functions can be embedded in the simulation platform. As a demonstration, this chapter provides two immune network computation models to generate the emergent services through computer simulation experiments on the platform. The experimental results show that the bio-entities on the platform provide quickly services to the users’ requests with short response time. The interactions among bio-entities maintain the load balance of the bio-network and make the resources be utilized reasonably. With the advantages of adaptability, extensibility, and survivability, the bio-network architecture provides a novel way to design new intelligent Internet information services and applications.