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From honeybees to Internet servers: biomimicry for distributed management of Internet hosting centers

Sunil Nakrani1,2 and Craig Tovey2

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An Internet hosting center hosts services on its server ensemble. The center must allocate servers dynamically amongst services to maximize revenue earned from hosting fees. The finite server ensemble, unpredictable request arrival behavior and server reallocation cost make server allocation optimization difficult. Server allocation closely resembles honeybee forager allocation amongst flower patches to optimize nectar influx. The resemblance inspires a honeybee biomimetic algorithm. This paper describes details of the honeybee self-organizing model in terms of information flow and feedback, analyzes the homology between the two problems and derives the resulting biomimetic algorithm for hosting centers. The algorithm is assessed for effectiveness and adaptiveness by comparative testing against benchmark and conventional algorithms. Computational results indicate that the new algorithm is highly adaptive to widely varying external environments and quite competitive against benchmark assessment algorithms. Other swarm intelligence applications are briefly surveyed, and some general speculations are offered regarding their various degrees of success.


PACS

89.20.Hh World Wide Web, Internet

07.05.Bx Computer systems: hardware, operating systems, computer languages, and utilities

Subjects

Instrumentation and measurement

Dates

Issue 4 (December 2007)

Received 9 August 2007, accepted for publication 10 August 2007

Published 16 October 2007



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