OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bio-Networking Architecture: An Approach to Leverage Super Distributed Object Environment using Biological Concepts and Mechanism Jun Suzuki and Tatsuya Suda Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Agenda Motivation to the Bio-Networking Architecture Bio-Networking Platform Design Current Project Status and Future Work Conclusion

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Motivation: Bio-Networking Architecture The explosive growth of the net places larger and more challenging demands on underlying communication software. Future network services and applications have to satisfy: Scalability Adaptability Availability and Survivability Autonomy, with minimum human configuration Networks need to have built-in mechanisms to provide these features large nets: beyond one’s capability to design

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Observation Observation: large scale biological systems scale, adapt, and survive  e.g. bee colony

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Our Approach Our approach: Bio-Networking Architecture apply biological concepts/mechanisms to future network services and applications  emergent behavior out of simple behaviors  life cycle energy gain/consumption/exchange replication (with mutation), reproduction (with cross over)  adaptation and evolution through species diversity and natural selection  decentralized discovery through social networking and pheromone emission.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Emergent Behavior Biological systems consist of many autonomous entities Useful group behavior emerges from autonomous local interaction of individuals with simple behaviors.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bio-Networking Architecture individuals = cyber-entities (objects/agents)  abstractions of various system components (users, resources and service components)  An application is constructed from a collection of cyber-entities. Cyber-entities  is autonomous with simple biological behaviors e.g. migration, replication, reproduction, death, energy exchange, relationship establishment, pheromone emission  makes its own decision according to its own behavioral policy.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Cyber-entity Example Behaviors Energy exchange biological entities naturally strive to gain energy by seeking and consuming food cyber-entity stores/expends energy (food/money) Energy is the unit of exchange for service or resource usages. energy exchange  CE gains energy from a user/another CE in exchange for performing a service  CE expend energy to use network/computing resources energy used as a natural selection mechanism  abundance induces replication or reproduction  scarcity induces death

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Cyber-entity Example Behaviors (cont’d) relationship establishment a cyber-entity knows something (e.g., name, address, service type) about another cyber-entity relationship can be used to group cyber-entities collectively providing a service application constructed from a collection of cyber- entities e.g., a web server (application) from a collection of web pages (cyber-entities

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Evolution and Adaptation Biological systems the biological system adjusts itself for environmental changes of long-term and short-term. key enablers:  species diversity from mutations and crossovers during replication/reproduction  natural selection keeps entities with beneficial features alive and increase reproduction probability

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bio-Networking Architecture cyber-entities (CEs) evolve, adapt, and localize through diversity and natural selection diversity  A CE behavior can be implemented by a number of algorithms/policies  human designers can introduce diversity in CEs  CEs replicate/reproduce with mutation/crossover natural selection  death from energy starvation  replication/reproduction from energy abundance

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Research Vision No central or coordinating entity exists. Autonomous decentralized system in mind A large number of CEs created by billions of Internet users, autonomously behaving CEs contacting other CEs providing related services, making relationship, diverse behavior policies getting created, good behaviors survive, bad ones die, making system flexible, adaptable and evolvable

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Agenda Bio-Networking Architecture Overview Motivation to Bionet Project Observations of large scale biological systems that scale, adapt, and survive in dynamic environment How bio concepts are used in the Bionet project Bio-Networking Platform Design Current Project Status and Future Work Conclusion

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bio-Networking Platform (Bionet Platform) Bionet Services Bionet Platform Bionet Container CE CE Context CE Java VM

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bio-Networking Architecture Components Bio-Networking Architecture consists of Cyber entity Cyber entity context Bionet platform

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Cyber-entity A cyber entity (CE) is the smallest component to create an application (network service). provides a simple service, replicates, reproduces, moves and dies autonomously. communicates with each other using FIPA ACL.  in both synchronous and asynchronous manner is a CORBA object with mobility.  IIOP is a message transport for ACL.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Cyber-entity Context CE Context is used to find available Bionet services. is created and associated with each CE implicitly by Bionet platform (Bionet Lifecycle service), when a CE is created, replicated, reproduced, or migrated from another host.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Platform runs on a Java virtual machine. Bionet Platform consists of 2 components: Bionet Services  provides a set of general-purpose runtime services that are frequently used for deploying and running CEs. Bionet Container  provides the bottom most operations to maintain Bionet platform.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Services Directory Cyber Entity Migration Pheromone Emission Resource Sensing Social Networking CommunicationLifecycle Security Bionet Services Relationship Management Energy Management Resource Allocation

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Life Cycle Service Life Cycle service manages life cycle of cyber-entities. provides the operations of  initialization  activation  deactivation  destroy  replication Mutation might occur  reproduction with crossover

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Energy Mgt. Service Energy is a unit of exchange for a service provided by another CE and for the resources the CE uses. Bionet Energy Management service manages the energy level of CEs. checks if a CE has enough energy when it migrates, replicates and reproduces.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Resource Sensing Service Resource Sensing Service senses Types, amount and costs of resources available on a local Bionet platform neighboring Bionet platforms reachable with n hops Types, amounts and costs of resources available on neighboring platforms Supported types of resource Physical resources: CPU time and memory space Logical resources: threads and transport connections

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Resource Allocation Service Resource allocation service allocates physical/logical resources to a CE. It requires a CE to pay energy for allocated resources.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Relationship Mgt. Service Relationship is used to Find other cyber-entities.  Bionet platform does not assume any centralized directory that knows all the CEs. Group cyber-entities collectively providing a service.  An application is constructed from a collection of CEs. Every CE finds others via its relationships. Each cyber-entity has zero or more relationships.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Relationship Management service establishes, inspects, update, and destroys relationships between CEs. Updates relationship strength. CE A CE arranging a travel plan Hotel reservation CE Flight reservation CE customer CE Hotel room whole seller CE partner service provider partner consumer service provider CE A CE arranging a travel plan acquaintance maven

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb The relationship strength is not fixed but changed dynamically. The decreases by a certain amount in every certain period. When the strength of a relationship becomes 0, Relationship Management service destroys the relationship. Relationship Management service provides the policies on how strength is increased. how many messages are exchanged between two CEs how much data is transferred between two CEs how much energy gets exchanged CE selects which policy to use.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Social Networking Service Human society: “six degrees of separation” concept network of family and friend relationships results in any two humans being separated by at most six relationships A asks his friends to find B; friends of A ask their friends to find B; etc.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Social Networking service allows cyber-entities to discover another cyber-entity on remote platform. Discovery is through relationships between cyber-entities.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Bionet Container provides the bottom most operations to maintain Bionet Platform.  CE registration/unregistration  CE activation/deactivation  resource management  CE reference management  request/event parsing

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Agenda Motivation to Bio-Networking Architecture Bio-Networking Platform Design Current Project Status and Future Work Conclusion

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Current Project Status Development of Bionet Simulator Simulation study of adaptation to changes of network environment Simulation study of evolution of cyber-entities Development of Bionet platform

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb An Ongoing project: Self-Organizing Agents It has been one of the biggest problem in traditional distributed object computing environments to decide and optimize object locations. Static and manual configuration in the environment without object mobility  e.g. Many objects on a powerful machine  Frequently interacting objects on the same host/process Tedious and time-consuming The system/object should be stopped; availability decreased. The decision is ad-hoc or static even in mobile agent environments. e.g. Developers define an agent itinerary that describes when and where to move at development time.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb We need more dynamic and autonomous mechanism of deciding agent location. Bionet facilitates this by using self-organizing cyber entities A CE organization is emerged from autonomous local interactions.  Energy exchange between CEs  Energy exchange between an CE and its platform

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Agent-agent/agent-platform interactions Energy in Bionet Unit of exchange for service or resource usages Agent-agent interaction Each agent gains energy from another agent (or user) in exchange for performing a service.  abundance induces replication or reproduction  scarcity induces death Agent-platform interaction Each agent expends energy to use network/computing resources.  e.g. thread, transport connection, memory space and CPU cycle Agent platform knows the types, amount and cost of available resources.

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb An Example Scenario Each agent asks its underlying platform to assign a thread, and pays its energy. The unit cost of a thread utilization may vary with the number of available threads. More idle threads exist in a pool, cheaper the unit cost is. Each agent behaves autonomously with its policies. e.g. An agent migrates to another host when migration cost is cheaper than thread utilization cost. e.g. An agent deactivates itself when its thread utilization cost is too expensive to pay. The concept of energy allows agents to consume available resources in a distributed environment effectively. Bionet Container CE agent registration table Thread pool (2) assigns an idle thread (3) requires the cost (1) registers

OMG TC meeting at Irvine Feb Wrap up Bionet provides a new paradigm to build network services and applications. Inspired by biology Bionet Platform is in design/early implementation stages Most of the elements are in place Several simulation results have supported our direction. Bionet Simulator is available at