An endocrinologic-inspired hardware implementation of a multicellular system

Within higher animals there operates an inter-cell communication system that is responsible for regulating the physiological balance of its host. The endocrine system uses hormone mediated messages to control the function of remote cell groups, invoking reactions to maintain chemical and physical equilibrium. The operation and structure of the endocrine system exhibits robustness and fault tolerance that has inspired the creation of reliability engineered electronic architecture. Previous work established a software model of such a system. The model was able to simulate arbitrary processing of a data stream whilst demonstrating tolerance to faults and repair. Following from this work, this paper outlines improvements to this model and the initial steps of its conversion into a hardware electronic system. The Bionode System contains thirty individual nodes connected in a loosely coupled network. Each Bionode contains a microcontroller and FPGA that can be configured to model the functionality of a cell; specifically the underlying endocrine based communication system and the top-level functions that perform useful data processing operations.