When BTexact Technologies, BT’s advanced communication technologies business, QinetiQ, one of Europe’s largest science and technology solutions providers and the Ministry of Defence, set out to collaborate in making the most effective possible use of limited radio spectrum for the next generation in battlefield communications technology, their first step was to take inspiration from the natural world.

To the uninitiated, it might sound odd that the development of state-of-the-art, potentially life-saving communications rests on the seemingly fragile laws of nature. But to the expert researchers involved, the self-organising properties that drive insect behaviour embodied a supremely logical approach.

Nature-inspired
Said BTexact researcher Richard Tateson: “Efficient use of radio spectrum is pivotal to maintaining an effective communications network. Because the problem is inherently distributed, spread across the area covered by the network, and dynamic, with demand and interference changing all the time, it makes sense to seek inspiration from natural systems which provide adaptive, flexible solutions.”

The combination of BTexact’s fruit flies algorithm with QinetiQ’s research into efficient spectrum management will now take nature-inspired research onto its next phase. Part of the project draws on earlier BTexact mobile phone network research inspired by the cell interactions during development of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. Fruit flies have no central planning function for their development from egg to adult, but instead, totally self-organising cells which decide among themselves what they will become, such as bristles and wing tips.

Applying this theory to assigning radio spectrum, it became clear to the BTexact team that this model – when made into an algorithm – had real potential.

Mimicking the flies’ own organisational attributes, the algorithm would allow base-stations in a mobile phone network to negotiate with each other and decide how the available radio frequencies will be divided up to meet the demand for calls without causing unacceptable interference. It would even ‘heal’ in the event of a base-station failure, totally negating the need for a central organiser to track events in the network and re-plan frequency use to accommodate faults and changes in demand.

Challenging conditions
Meanwhile, QinetiQ researchers had been looking into novel designs for a future battlefield spectrum management architecture that used dynamic and distributed frequency assignment.

Paul Wells, group leader of secure wireless solutions at QinetiQ explained: “In a battlefield environment, networks must continue to function in the face of serious disruption such as unplanned movements and accidental or deliberate interference from other radio transmitters.

“That means that central planning becomes very challenging in these conditions; because the situation can be quickly taken over by events. So it’s crucial to try and attain both efficient assignment of the spectrum, but also a rapid response to changes in a given situation, as it happens.”

And already, the work is proving its worth in becoming the first of its kind to take this somewhat radical approach to improving battlefield communications. After all, where else, other than in a life or death situation, could useful technology prove itself more worthwhile?

The humble bumblebee
Nature is also the inspiration for a similar BTexact project, which aims to develop intelligent mobile software agents for the future life of the mobile phone, based on the behaviour of bees.

Robert Ghanea-Hercock from BTexact’s research department takes up the story: “The more internet services we’ll command from our 3G phones in the near future, the more we stand to learn by looking at the behaviour of highly socialised insects, such as bees.

He added: “These insects are found all over the world, suggesting not only that their forms of social organisation serve them well, but that they are also highly adaptable.” Indeed, years of research have concluded that insects behave like human-designed software agents, in that they carry out simple individual tasks, but they can also work collectively to complete complex tasks. With this in mind, BTexact set out to design a mobile agent system to minimise the code required to activate intelligent 3G networks basing its work on a model of colonial bee behaviour.

Such intelligent agent-driven networks as these – which may be inbuilt in 3G phones in a matter of just a few years – are so designed that they can learn user profiles and actively seek out the user’s preferences, aided by intelligent agent technology. The challenge comes in ensuring that as part of that design, they remain lightweight and portable, and the networks they use do not become overloaded by masses of complex intelligent agent coding.

A hive of activity
Robert said: “To get around this problem, we created a model that localises the majority of the 3G phone’s functions into an anchored, or non-mobile ‘hive’ agent, which communicates with fairly simple specialised mobile agents through a message-passing mechanism. The model then sends task-specific agents to targeted host servers, just as an insect colony sends out specialised units for
activities like foraging. So, only a small percentage of the software agent collective needs to be moved – which reduces the load on the network.”

This model activates scout agents to move around the network environment, finding available resource on the network, and passing that back to the hive agent. Meanwhile, queen agents – that act as local managers – are launched and in turn deploy worker agents to perform the specified tasks – just in the same way as been organise themselves to get the job done.

The resulting mobile agents are relatively lightweight, with queen agents at just nine kilobits in size – making a very efficient use of network resources with no loss of service. Robert added: “Co-operation is the key factor, and it's what makes the behaviour of the social insect world so commercially feasible in designing new forms of network management.”

Proving that, far from being a bizarre source of inspiration, what the insect world can teach the telecommunications industry – is clearly the natural selection in leading-edge research.
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