Bio-inspired grid information system with epidemic tuning

This paper proposes a bio-inspired approach for the construction of a Grid information system in which metadata documents that describe Grid resources are disseminated and logically reorganized on the Grid. A number of ant-like agents travel the Grid through P2P interconnections and use probability functions to replicate resource descriptors and collect those related to resources with similar characteristics in nearby Grid hosts. Resource reorganization results from the collective activity of a large number of agents, which per-form simple operations at the local level, but together engender an advanced form of "swarm intelligence" at the global level. An adaptive tuning mechanism based on the epidemic paradigm is used to regulate the dissemination of resources according to users' needs. Simulation analysis shows that the epidemic mechanism can be used to balance the two main functionalities of the proposed approach: entropy reduction and resource replication.