STEM-Net: An evolutionary architecture for highly-reconfigurable wireless networks

The heterogeneity of current telecommunication access technologies is dramatically increasing the complexity and costs required for the set-up and maintenance of the network by service providers, and it is also posing important limitations in terms of network interoperability from the end-users' perspectives. For these reasons, research on wireless systems has investigated the possibility to deploy wireless devices with self-organizing and self-managing capabilities. However, most of these approaches limit the re-configuration capabilities to a specific layer (e.g. routing), and do not investigate the property of reconfiguration of the network as a whole. In this paper, we propose an alternative architecture (called STEM-Net) for network infrastructure deployment, extension, and management. In STEM-Net self-organization is managed through fully-reconfigurable wireless devices (called stem-nodes), that can undergo mutations to fulfill a specific tasks, like their biological counterpart. In this work we present the main characteristics of stem-nodes, and we discuss how their evolutionary behaviour can result in an extreme flexibility of the whole network segment, transforming the technological heterogeneity from a limitation to a richness.