Lars Bensmann, Thomas Büning, Mike Duhm, René Jeruschkat, Gero Kathagen, Johannes Meth, Kai Moritz, Christian Müller, Thorsten Pannenbäcker, Björn Vogel und Rene Zeglin
Interim Report of Project-Group 439 - BeeHive – The Energy Efficient Scheduling and Routing Framework
2004-03
"Cooperation in foraging has evolved in many species of group-living organisms, including insects, spiders, colonial invertebrates, fishes, birds, and mammals (...). One of the most sophisticated forms of cooperative foraging occurs in a social insect, the honeybee (Apis mellifera). The thousands of forager within a typical honeybee colony work together in harmony, forming an ensemble which can monitor an area of 100 square kilometres for flower patches, choose among these patches to focus the colony’s foraging labor on the riches ones, and adjust its patch selectivity in relation to forage abundance and colony need (...)." [SV88]
But how is this cooperation possible? In the following some processes are looked at which on the one hand leads to evaluations and on the other hand and primarily how this information is spread and processed throughout the honey bee colony, that is how the communication of the bees is working.
Beehive is a routing algorithm with emphasise on ad-hoc mobile networks and energy awareness. It is completely distributed and does not need global information about the network condition. The algorithm is based on source routing and on-demand routing. The underlying design of Beehive was inspired by the collaborative search and collection of nutriment as bees do it. This design evolved over the time in the simulations and was tweaked in different places to get optimized results. The current version therefore shares the same ideas, but has been enhanced with optional components, which let Beehive compete with other routing algorithms such as DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) and AODV (Ad-hoc On-Demand Vector routing).