A Novel Bio-Inspired Approach for High-Performance Management in Service-Oriented Networks

Service-continuity in distributed computing can be enhanced by designing self-organized systems, with a non-fixed structure, able to modify their structure and organization, as well as adaptively react to internal and external environment changes. In this paper, an architecture exploiting a bio-inspired management approach, i.e., the functioning of cell metabolism, for specialized computing environments in Service-Oriented Networks (SONs) is proposed. Similar to the processes acting in metabolic networks, the nodes communicate to each other by means of stimulation or suppression chains giving rise to emergent behaviors to defend against foreign invaders, attacks, and malfunctioning. The main contribution of this work is a novel bio-inspired methodology for SON analysis to improve the network reliability and robustness for maintaining service-continuity. To show the effectiveness of the proposed computational framework, an embedded Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) prototyped SON for a relevant healthcare imaging application is also outlined. In particular, our case study extracts and analyzes the Cerebral Vascular Tree from Magnetic Resonance Angiography series via a Maximum Intensity Projection algorithm; the proposed solution addresses and implements some basic issues of an interesting diagnosis tool for cerebral aneurysm detection. The prototyped system was tested and evaluated in terms of execution time and used resource analysis, by achieving a 4× speed-up factor compared to the software counterpart.