Self-Assembling Networks

prostoalex writes "Researchers from Humboldt University found a way to build self-assembling networks. By emulating the behavior of ants and insects the team, which is led by Frank Schweitzer, demonstrated a simulation where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network and quickly react to a broken link or damages. Schweitzer's research papers are available off his personal Web site. The scientific paper referred in the original article, Self-Assembling of Networks in an Agent-Based Model is available off Cornell server."

Comments

centralized? self asembly?

[IAR80]

For now I stick to OSPF. And it is not centralized also. And so are BGP, RIP an ISIS.

A good research work

[varjag]

The paper is indeed very interesting and innovative, but keep in mind that it is very far from being suitable to embed into your next 802.11 adapter.

While this approach is indeed appealing, it has still some drawbacks, e.g:
- generally, you can't tell what your topoligy your network will end up having, so forget about architecting one
- it does not guarantee that all your nodes will end up being networked within a fixed number of attempts (see the fig. 3 in the paper)
- it tends to require significant redundancy of interchangeable nodes to function well

Such approach can work well, say, for military field communications, but would be clearly suboptimal for building a corporate network.

And of course, as most of agent research, this is still too far from established technology ready for production.