From biology to evolve-able pervasive ICT systems

The emergence of future pervasive ICT environments, characterized by the massive proliferation of embedded electronic devices with communication and computing capabilities, are posing enormous challenges to existing approaches to networking, service provisioning and system management. In this paper, we make a case to go for biology as possible source of novel, revolutionary design patterns suitable to large-scale highly dynamic ICT systems. We also present a case study, the EU- funded BIONETS project, which tackles the increased complexity of large-scale ubiquitous systems by applying an evolutionary framework to the provisioning of pervasive services.