Anternet - Ants "use" TCP

In my time degree in Computer Engineering, a discipline that I had the name of Computer Graphics, in which they dealt with some technology. I remember at the time of performing a job where I had to simulate the behavior of birds, based on the model of Craig Reynolds (called boids) who realized that the movement of flocks of birds and schools of fish were synchronized there is no point centralized control. Besides the model Craig Reynolds also studied how the ants behaved. Recently, researcher Deborah Gordon said the ants behave similarly to the communication protocol TCP / IP.

Years ago I remember having studied how ants behave. According to what I read at the time, the ants leave a pheromone trail along the pathways, and the more traces are left, more ants are attracted to them. So when a worker ant finds food, it leaves behind a trail on the way back to the colony, and this is followed by other ants that reinforce the trail when they return to the colony. When the food runs out, the "rails" are not rescheduled by returning ants and the scent disappears. This behavior helps ants adapt to changes in their environment. When a path already establecido to a food source is blocked by a new obstacle, the worker ants to leave this path and try to explore new routes. This behavior has been adapted to use some software that, for example, the optimization algorithm of ant colony.

Recently, researcher Deborah Gordon , Stanford University (USA), revealed that according to a study relizado found that there is a continuing pattern in the behavior establecido by ants when they seek comida.Deborah, in collaboration with Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computing sciences also at Stanford University, have concluded that the way ants seeking food is similar to the way how the TCP transport protocol that is used to control how data is transmitted over the Internet.

As is known, data are transmitted using the TCP protocol (via packets) to a certain one recipient, the sender need confirmed that no guarantees and reliability in communication. This feedback also avoid congestion by adapting the transmission rate ie if the response acknowledgment (ACK) is fast, the issuer may increase the rate of transmission. On the other hand, if the confirmation response (ACK) is delayed, it indicates that there is congestion in the network and thus the sender adapts the transmission rate of the packets.

According to researchers, ants behave in the same way as TCP, when the demand for comida.Segundo the studies, they found that each time an ant quickly return to the nest (ACK) are more ants to the local envidas where the food. On the other hand, if ants take longer to reach the tingling is a signal that the food is scarce and thus less ants follow to place the food.

Since ants have thoroughly tested the TCP protocol, now becomes an interesting challenge to analyze in detail the behavior of the same because there are certainly still many things that these little animals can teach us and help in the efficiency of communications networks.

Thanks for the tip to Lawrence Medeiros of news!
 

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