Fruit Fly Nervous System Can Pave Way for Wireless Sensor Networks

A recent study conducted in fruit flies revealed that the fruit flies nervous system could be used to effectively deploy wireless sensor networks and other distributed computing applications.

Ziv Bar-Joseph at Carnegie Mellon University found that the cells in the fly's developing nervous system manage to organize themselves so that a small number of cells serve as leaders that provide direct connections with every other nerve cell.

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The find indicates similar techniques used to manage the distributed computer networks. However, the fly's nervous system techniques are much simpler and more robust.

Using the fruit fly technique, Bar-Joseph, co-author Noga Alon and their team designed a new distributed computing algorithm, which is particularly well suited for wireless sensor networks, such as environmental monitoring, where sensors are dispersed in a lake or waterway, or systems for controlling swarms of robots.

"Computational and mathematical models have long been used by scientists to analyze biological systems," said Bar-Joseph.

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"Here we've reversed the strategy, studying a biological system to solve a long-standing computer science problem."

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).

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Every processor in such a network is either a leader (a member of the MIS) or is connected to a leader, but the leaders are not interconnected.

The researchers created a computer algorithm based on the fly's approach and proved that it provides a fast solution to the MIS problem.

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"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," Bar-Joseph said.

"This makes the solution applicable to many more applications."

Source-ANI