James' research led him to a career with Novell, Inc., an industrial network software company. He plans to attend graduate school to further pursue his research. His project gave him the chance to apply the concepts of large biological systems to his knowledge of network services and applications. In the development and execution of this research project, James learned that the key to success is to "define goals and milestones and steadily progress to accomplish [those] goals." James feels that "the essence of research is that you are investigating something new and unknown, which makes it a very challenging yet rewarding activity."

Services and applications in the Next Generation Internet (NGI) have several key requirements. They must scale to billions of users and network nodes, adjust to heterogeneous and dynamic networking environments and conditions with minimal administration, resist large-scale attacks and failures, and support deployment and extensibility with minimal complexity. The proposed Bio-Networking Architecture is inspired by the observation that the biological world has already developed the mechanisms necessary to achieve these key requirements. This project examines the biological concepts of autonomous behavior and adaptation through the conduct of simulations. An autonomous, adaptable population of cyber-entities is compared to the static, non-adaptive approaches that are currently used to implement network services. An example of the latter technique is the use of statically placed servers. This research has shown that an adaptable population of cyber-entities can deliver performance comparable to six statically placed servers at a fraction of the cost.

Tatsuya Suda Department of Information and Computer Science

James Fehlig attacked a new network architecture called Bio-Networking. Bio-Networking Architecture is inspired by the observation that the biological world has already developed the mechanisms necessary to achieve the key requirements of future network services and applications, such as scalability, adaptability to heterogeneous and dynamic conditions, evolution, security, survivability, and simplicity. James developed a simulator to evaluate feasibility and efficiency of the Bio-Networking Architecture. The research James has carried out will deepen our knowledge on how biological concepts can be applied to network architecture designs. Working with James has been a very exciting and rewarding experience for me.