Biological principles for future internet architecture design

Currently, a large number of activities on Internet redesign are being discussed in the research community. While today´s Internet was initially planned as a datagram-oriented communication network among research facilities, it has grown and evolved to accommodate unexpected diversity in services and applications. For the future Internet this trend is anticipated to continue even more. Such developments demand that the architecture of the new-generation Internet be designed in a dynamic, modular, and adaptive way. Features like these can often be observed in biological processes that serve as inspiration for designing new cooperative architectural concepts. Our contribution in this article is twofold. First, unlike previous discussions on biologically inspired network control mechanisms, we do not limit ourselves to a single method, but consider ecosystems and coexisting environments of entities that can cooperate based on biological principles. Second, we illustrate our grand view by not only taking inspiration from biology in the design process, but also sketching a possible way to implement biologically driven control in a future Internet architecture.