Better Networking Through Nature

The New York Times has an interesting piece about applying lessons from nature - specifically ant colonies - to solving networking and other problems. Not quite on the same level as Spidergoats, but intriguing nonetheless.

Comments

Rogue ants

[vandemar]

Those of us who have played Sim Ant before would probably see some advantages to using "pheremone" based routing on the internet. There is a fundamental difference, however, between real ants, and computers on the internet. Real ants are genetically programmed with loyalty to their hive. Computers, on the other hand, are plagued with script kiddies, worms and greedy lawyers.

The potential for havoc is high if this scheme is ever implemented and script kiddies all over start leaving fake "pheremone" trails around the internet.

One problem I see

[BillyGoatThree]

If packets can communicate with each other to give routing info, they can also communicate with the outside world to do the same. This allows packet tracing under all conditions, rather than just ideal conditions as it is now.

hmmm

[ferkelparade]

This sounds like a neat idea, but is it actually more than a nice metaphor? ie, how would this look in practice?

The examples the article gives talk about data packets travelling between two destinations (nest and food source) or one data stream travelling between various locations (travelling salesman). Reality in any current network looks pretty different, however - even in the pretty small company I work for (about 50 employees), there are about 200 machines, each with several client and server tasks running at the same time which makes for a hell of a lot of packets to be routed (pretty easy in this example since they are all routed through the same stack of switches, but you get the idea).

For this approach to work, every connection from machine a to machine b would need some sort of unique identifier and then mark its path with its very own pheromones - quite a bit of overhead if you ask me. Imagine billions of simultaneous connections on the internet each leaving a trail of unique identifiers on their way...
(unless you opt for an "intelligent" solution where, say, my connection attempt to slashdot is broken up into several steps like "find best path to isp", "find path from isp to transatlantic cable", etc., but that would require a general map of the whole network's layout already be present on every router - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of ant-routing).