Service emergence based on relationship among self-organizing entities

In this paper, we describe the Jack-in-the-Net (Ja-Net) architecture for adaptive services in a large scale, open network environment. Using biologically inspired concepts, Ja-Net achieves built-in capabilities to create/emerge services adaptively according to dynamically changing network conditions and user preferences. In Ja-Net, a service is implemented by a collection of autonomous system components called cyber-entities. Cyber-entities are autonomous with simple behaviors and interact with each other using Ja-NetACL (Agent Communication Language) to jointly provide a service. For instance, cyber-entities migrates from node to node and find a new cyber-entity to interact with. Also, cyber-entities may establish a relationship with interaction partners to form a group to provide a service. The strength of the relationship between cyber-entities is a measure for the usefulness of the relationship and is adjusted based on the level of satisfaction indicated by the user who received the service. As relationships grow, cyber-entities self-organize by reducing the number of cyber-entities to interact with based on the strength of the relationship. Consequently, a group of cyberentities emerge to provide services that users prefer. We implemented a prototype of Ja-Net to verify the feasibility of autonomous interaction and service emergence features of Ja-Net.