BIONETS : a New Vision of Opportunistic Networks

Most wireless networks are built around an infrastructure, where all communications are routed through base stations that act as gateways between the wireless and wired network. However, there may be situations in which it is impossible or not economically viable to build such an infrastructure. In these cases, a collection of wireless mobile nodes could self-organize into a temporary ad hoc network, leveraging nodes mobility to provide system-wide information dissemination. The goal of the BIONETS project (BIOlogically-inspired autonomic NETworks and Services) is to provide a biologicallyinspired open networking paradigm for the creation, dissemination, execution, and evolution of autonomic services, able to adapt to the surrounding environment and user needs, to evolve without direct human supervision, and able to deal with large-scale networks of heterogeneous nodes ranging from small, cheap devices to more complex network nodes. In this paper, we review the most innovative aspects of the research activities carried out by the BIONETS project consortium, focusing in particular on two novel information dissemination strategies.