Fruit flies give a whole new meaning to the term ‘bugs in the system’. The fly has evolved a method for arranging the tiny, hair-like structures it uses to feel and hear the world that's so efficient a team of scientists in Israel and at Carnegie Mellon University say it could be used to more effectively deploy wireless sensor networks and other distributed computing applications. Bar-Joseph, Alon and their co-authors — Yehuda Afek of Tel Aviv University and Naama Barkai, Eran Hornstein and Omer Barad of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, used the insights gained from fruit flies to design a new distributed computing algorithm. They found it has qualities that make it particularly well suited for networks in which the number and position of the nodes is not completely certain. These include wireless sensor networks, such as environmental monitoring, where sensors are dispersed in a lake or waterway, or systems for controlling swarms of robots. Today's large-scale computer systems and the nervous system of a fly both take a distributive approach to performing tasks. Though the thousands or even millions of processors in a computing system and the millions of cells in a fly's nervous system must work together to complete a task, none of the elements need to have complete knowledge of what's going on, and the systems must function despite failures by individual elements. In the computing world, one step toward creating this distributive system is to find a small set of processors that can be used to rapidly communicate with the rest of the processors in the network, what graph theorists call a maximal independent set (MIS). That can be a problem for applications such as wireless sensor networks, where sensors might be distributed randomly and all might not be within communication range of each other. The researchers created a computer algorithm based on the fly's approach and proved that it provides a fast solution to the MIS problem. “The run time was slightly greater than current approaches, but the biological approach is efficient and more robust because it doesn't require so many assumptions, this makes the solution applicable to many more applications," said Bar-Joseph. For more information please visit: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan13_fruitflynetwork.shtml
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