Immune System Inspired Strategies for Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how immune system-inspired modular architectures can optimize communication and response tradeoffs in distributed systems, especially in resource-constrained environments like sensor networks.

Contribution

It introduces a sub-modular architecture model inspired by natural immune systems for efficient distributed system design.

Findings

Sub-modular immune architecture balances local search and global response.

Experimental data supports sub-modular lymph node scaling.

Applicable to distributed sensor networks and robot control.

Abstract

Many components of the IS are constructed as modular units which do not need to communicate with each other such that the number of components increases but the size remains constant. However, a sub-modular IS architecture in which lymph node number and size both increase sublinearly with body size is shown to efficiently balance the requirements of communication and migration, consistent with experimental data. We hypothesize that the IS architecture optimizes the tradeoff between local search for pathogens and global response using antibodies. Similar to natural immune systems, physical space and resource are also important constraints on Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), especially distributed systems applications used to connect low-powered sensors using short-range wireless communication. AIS problems like distributed robot control will also require a sub-modular architecture to efficiently balance the tradeoff between local search for a solution and global response or proliferation of the solution between different components.