Biologically-inspired design of autonomous and adaptive grid services

This paper describes and evaluates a biologically-inspired network architecture that allows grid services to autonomously adapt to dynamic environment changes in the network. Based on the observation that the immune system has elegantly achieved autonomous adaptation, the proposed mechanism, the iNet artificial immune system, is designed after the mechanisms behind how the immune system detects antigens (e.g., viruses) and specifically reacts to them. iNet models a set of environment conditions (e.g., network traffic and resource availability) as an antigen and a behavior of grid services (e.g., migration and replication) as an antibody. iNet allows each grid service to autonomously sense its surrounding environment conditions (an antigen) to evaluate whether it adapts well to the sensed conditions, and if it does not, adoptively perform a behavior (an antibody) suitable for the sensed conditions. Simulation results show that iNet allows grid services to autonomously adapt their population and location to environmental changes for improving their performance (e.g., response time and throughput) and balancing workload.