Self-organization is a great concept for building scalable systems consisting of huge numbers of subsystems. The primary objectives are coordination and collaboration on a global goal. Until now, many self-organization methods have been developed for communication networks in general and ad hoc networks in particular. Nevertheless, the term self-organization is still often misunderstood or misused. This paper contributes to the ad hoc community by providing a better understanding of self-organization in ad hoc networks. Primarily, solutions for the medium access contol and the network layer are analyzed and discussed. The main contribution of this paper is a categorization of self-organization methodologies. Additionally, well-known methods in ad hoc networks are classified and some case studies are provided.

In this position paper, we propose the development of a new biologically inspired paradigm based on fungal colonies, for the application to pervasive adaptive systems. Fungal colonies have a number of properties that make them an excellent candidate for inspiration for engineered systems. Here we propose the application of such inspiration to a speckled computing platform. We argue that properties from fungal colonies map well to properties and requirements for controlling SpeckNets and suggest that an existing mathematical model of a fungal colony can developed into a new computational paradigm. 1

A SEA Swarm (Sensor Equipped Aquatic Swarm) moves as a group with water current and enables 4D (space and time) monitoring of local underwater events such as contaminants and intruders. For prompt alert reporting, mobile sensors forward events to mobile sinks (i.e., autonomous underwater vehicles) via geographic routing, thus requiring a location service. In this paper, we analyze various design choices to realize an efficient location service in a SEA Swarm. We find that conventional ad hoc network location service protocols cannot be directly used, because the entire swarm moves along water current. We show that maintaining location information in a 2D plane is an optimal design choice. Given this, we propose a bio-inspired location service called a Phero-Trail location service protocol. In Phero-Trail, location information is stored in a 2D upper hull of a SEA Swarm, and a mobile sink uses its trajectory (à la a pheromone trail of ants) projected to the 2D hull to maintain location information. This enables mobile sensors to efficiently locate a mobile sink via an expanding spiral curve search. Our preliminarily results show that Phero-Trail performs better than existing approaches. 1.

The development of computer networks has seen a paradigm shift from static, hierarchical network structures to highly distributed, autonomous systems without any form of centralized control. For networking nodes, the ability to self-adapt and self-organize in a changing environment has become a key issue. In conventional network structures,