Filamentous Fungi Growth as Metaphor for Mobile Communication Networks Routing

Abstract

Filamentous fungi have a structure called mycelium which is the vegetative part of the organism that forms the body or colony, which can function as a support, reproduction and absorption structure of nutrients and is composed of a tangle of hyphae that can grow without stopping while the fungus finds food and favorable conditions to survive. Inspired by fungi, it is possible to directly equate the structure of the mycelium with that of a communication network, so hyphae can be compared to links, and the tips and derivations of hyphae with nodes of the network. In this context, the growth process of filamentous fungi to explore the environment in which they live can serve as a metaphor for routing algorithms that seek a path between a source and a destination node. Based on this idea, this paper investigates a functional routing algorithm (HyphaNet) for wireless communication networks. Analytical modeling and validation tests proved that HyphaNet converges to more advantageous routes while exploring the search space. Finally, it can deliver good performance on the metrics packet delivery rate, average end-to-end delay and overhead, when compared to other well-known protocols.

Keywords

• mobile communication
• routing protocols
• biological system modeling
• learning systems
• performance analysis