Special Issue on Bio-inspired computing and communication in wireless Ad Hoc and sensor networks

TY - JOUR

T1 - Special Issue on Bio-inspired computing and communication in wireless Ad Hoc and sensor networks

AU - Akan, Ozgur B.

AU - Dressler, Falko

AU - Leibnitz, Kenji

AU - Znati, Taieb

N1 - Funding Information: Ozgur B. Akan ⁎ akan@eee.metu.edu.tr Middle East Technical University, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 06531 Ankara, Turkey ⁎ Tel.: +90 312 210 2353; fax: +90 312 210 2304. Falko Dressler dressler@informatik.uni-erlangen.de University of Erlangen, Germany Kenji Leibnitz leibnitz@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp Osaka University, Japan Taieb Znati znati@cs.pitt.edu University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA Guest Editors A wide spectrum of applications and services is currently being developed and designed to be built on top of various heterogeneous and significantly challenging network architectures such as wireless mesh networks, mobile ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor and actor networks. These challenging communication architectures are mainly characterized by heterogeneous and resource-constrained nodes, restricted communication channels, highly dynamic environments, lack of any fixed infrastructure, and large scale network deployments that strongly vary in their density. Such features and challenges, in turn, mandate intelligent, adaptive, autonomic, coordinated, self-organizing, and efficient processing, as well as novel communication approaches to handle the complexity of these ambitious wireless systems. The turn to nature has brought us many unforeseen great concepts. Natural biological systems intrinsically possess and exploit similar features by providing elegant and extremely efficient solutions for the challenges and tasks faced in their natural operation. It is of extreme importance to bridge the communication technologies with biological sciences and capture the analogy between these two distinct disciplines. To this end, this special issue is dedicated to capture the state-of-the-art and the recent advances in the newly emerging area of biologically inspired computing and communication in heterogeneous wireless architectures such as wireless mesh networks, mobile ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor and actor networks. For this very exciting and interdisciplinary topic, we have received 30 responses to our call-for-papers on broad scope of subjects on bio-inspired computing and communications. As a result of thorough review process by experts in respective areas, this special issue consists of 7 selected papers describing novel solution strategies inspired by the biological systems to address the challenges of many computing and communication systems. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are an emerging technology for providing broadband wireless connectivity to end-users generally in an ad hoc and self-organized manner. To this end, self-organizing and evolving features of biological systems stand as a promising solution approach for networking problems in WMNs. In the article titled “A Genetic Approach to Joint Routing and Link Scheduling for Wireless Mesh Networks” L. Badia, A. Botta, and L. Lenzini investigate the joint link scheduling and routing problems within given deadlines. Considering that signal-to-interference ratio is available, they first develop a theoretical model to formulate the task of deriving joint routing and scheduling as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. In order to solve this ILP problem and obtain a jointly optimized routing and scheduling solution, Genetic algorithm-based mechanism is developed and its efficiency and effectiveness are clearly verified through simulation experiments. The following paper titled “A Genetic Algorithm Based Approach for Energy Efficient Routing in Two-Tiered Sensor Networks” by A. Bari, S. Wazed, A. Jaekel, and S. Bandyopadhyay also exploits the self-evolutionary feature of genetic algorithms and presents a two-tiered energy-aware communication strategy to significantly prolong sensor network lifetime. An integer linear program (ILP) formulation for optimal, energy-aware routing is derived and a Genetic algorithm-based technique is developed for efficient scheduling of communication. It has been shown in the performance evaluation that the proposed genetic algorithm-based two-tiered routing solution is always able to yield an optimal solution for small networks, and can also handle large networks, where the traditional routing algorithms experience significant performance drops. In their paper “Bio-inspired Topology Control for Knowledge Sharing Mobile Agents”, E. Urrea et al. discuss different approaches for knowledge sharing bio-inspired mobile agents with the objective of maintaining a uniform node distribution in a mobile ad hoc network deployed over a geographical terrain. The speed and direction of mobile knowledge sharing agents are determined based on genetic algorithms. The authors develop an analytical model which reveals that the best fitness value can be found when the number of neighbors for a mobile agent is equal to the mean node degree. Simulation software is developed to show the effectiveness of the proposed genetic algorithm-based techniques and the authors verify that their genetic algorithm-based techniques converge towards a uniform node distribution more effectively compared to other traditional approaches. Routing problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have been heavily studied because of its extremely challenging features such as lack of static infrastructure, dynamically varying link availabilities, and resource limitations such as communication capacity and node capabilities. Due to very same set of challenges, bio-inspired techniques such as ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been shown to stand as a promising solution approach for efficient routing in MANETs. In the next paper, titled “A Hybrid ant colony OPtimization routing algorithm for Mobile ad hoc NETwork” by J.P. Wang, E. Osagie, P. Thulasiraman, and R.K. Thulasiram, a hybrid routing algorithm based on ant colony optimization and zone routing framework of bordercasting is introduced. The main idea of their algorithm is based on ants hopping from one zone to the next, to perform local proactive route discovery within a node’s neighborhood and reactive communication between the neighborhoods. The authors have shown the improvement achieved by their solution and the strength of bio-inspired routing solution in ad hoc networks through extensive simulation experiments. One of the important challenges in sensor network design is the determination of the network infrastructure with the additional constraints related to battery power minimization and redundancy. Many heuristics have been proposed to this generally NP-hard problem in the literature. In “A Circulatory System Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks” V. Pappas, D. Verma, B.J. Ko, and A. Swami present a new solution to this old problem based on the mammalian circulatory system. They investigate the mammalian circulatory system, derive the circulation graphs and develop solution for a practical sensor network deployment with minimum battery power requirements. With simulation experiments, the proposed circulatory system-based approach is shown to yield an improved performance compared to the current state-of-the-art techniques. Vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) represent an emerging technology, which extends the application domain of sensor networks such as traffic reporting, aid to environmental monitoring, and distributed surveillance. In typical urban sensing operations, it is critical to effectively coordinate the harvesting operations of multiple agents in a decentralized and efficient way. To this end, the next paper “Bio-inspired Multi-Agent Data Harvesting in a Proactive Urban Monitoring Environment” by K.-W. Lee, U. Lee, E. Magistretti, M. Gerla, P. Bellavista, and P. Lio presents a novel bio-inspired meta-data harvesting algorithm, which effectively covers a large search area based on alternating foraging behaviors inspired by E. coli chemotaxis and Lévy flights. The proposed mechanism also avoids harvesting work duplication via stigmergy-based prevention of useless concentration of agents in the same region at the same time. The authors verified the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism and clearly shown that the existing decentralized techniques are outperformed under a wide range of operation parameters. Due to the under-developed and extremely primitive nature of their central nerve systems, insects have evolved a set of extremely powerful, highly distributed, fault-tolerant yet structurally simple sensory systems. In the article titled “Insect Sensory Systems Inspired Computing and Communications” by Z. Ma and A. Krings, the chemosensory communication systems in many insect colonies are considered as wireless sensory networks with the differences that insects encode messages with semiochemicals rather than with radio frequencies and processing unit is the constrained individual insect’s brain, sensory and neuromotor systems rather than a silicon microchip. The authors introduce the state-of-the art research in insect sensory systems from entomological perspectives and then propose potential new research problems inspired by insect sensory systems. They also discussed in details and justified how and why insect sensory systems may inspire novel computing and communications paradigms. It has been a great pleasure to organize this special issue, which reveals important research results in the broad field of bio-inspired computing and communications and highlights future research avenues on this emerging research field. We would like to thank Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz, Editor-in-Chief of Ad Hoc Networks (Elsevier) journal, for giving us the opportunity to organize this special issue and for his support and encouragement. We also thank Elsevier and our journal manager Mary Lynn van Dijk for their great help in the organization of this issue. We also thank all authors for their submissions and all reviewers for their diligent work in evaluating these submissions. We believe that the potential for bio-inspired solutions for communications and computing is far from being fully recognized. We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading these distinguished papers and find appealing hints for future explorative activities on this timely topic. Ozgur B. Akan received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Bilkent University and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2004. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Middle East Technical University. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and Editor for ACM/Springer Wireless Networks Journal. He is an IEEE Senior Member. His current research interests include bio-inspired communications, wireless sensor networks, network information theory, signal processing for wireless networks, and nano-scale communications. Falko Dressler is an assistant professor leading the Autonomic Networking Group at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen. He teaches on self-organizing sensor and actor networks, network security, and communication systems. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen in 1998 and 2003, respectively. Since 2004, he is with the Computer Networks and Communication Systems group at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen. He is an Editor for the Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks journal, the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks (WINET) journal, and the Journal of Autonomic and Trusted Computing (JoATC). He is Senior Member of the IEEE (IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Computer Society), member of ACM and GI (Gesellschaft für Informatik). He is actively participating in several working groups of the IETF. His research activities are focused on (but not limited to) Autonomic Networking addressing issues in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Self-Organization, Bio-inspired Mechanisms, Network Security, Network Monitoring and Measurements, and Robotics. Kenji Leibnitz received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Würzburg in Germany, where he was also a research assistant at the Institute of Computer Science, Department of Distributed Systems. In 2004, he joined the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at Osaka University in Japan as a postdoctoral research fellow and since July 2006 he is a specially appointed associate professor at the Advanced Network Architecture Laboratory in the Department of Information Networking, working within the framework of the Yuragi Super-COE Project. His main focus of research lies on the modeling and application of biologically inspired mechanisms to information networks, especially in dynamical noise-driven methods for self-organization and self-adaptation of overlay and sensor networks. He is a member of the IEICE. Taieb Znati received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 1988, and a M.S. degree in Computer Science from Purdue University, in 1984. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Telecommunications in the Department of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. He currently serves as the Director of the Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division at the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 2000 to 2004, he served as a Senior Program Director for networking research at NSF. He also served as the Committee Chairperson of the Information Technology Research (ITR) Program, an NSF-wide research initiative in information technology. His current research interests are on network science and engineering, with the focus on the design of scalable, robust and reliable network architectures and protocols for wired and wireless communication networks. He is a recipient of several research grants from government agencies and from industry. He is frequently invited to present keynotes in networking and distributed conferences both in the United States and abroad. He is very active in the research community. He served as the general chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2005, the general chair of SECON 2004, the first IEEE conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, the general chair of the Annual Simulation Symposium, and the general chair of the Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulation Conference. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems and Networks, the Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal, the Journal on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Journal of Wireless Networks, and the Journal of Mobile Communication, Computation and information and the Journal on Ad-Hoc Networks. He was also a member of the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

PY - 2009/6

Y1 - 2009/6

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=58149186805&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=58149186805&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.adhoc.2008.06.002

DO - 10.1016/j.adhoc.2008.06.002

M3 - Editorial

AN - SCOPUS:58149186805

SN - 1570-8705

VL - 7

SP - 651

EP - 653

JO - Ad Hoc Networks

JF - Ad Hoc Networks

IS - 4

ER -