Emergence

In recent years the topic of emergence has been gaining attention from a variety of disciplines ranging from biology to software engineering. Whether it has been a case of understanding the behaviour of ant colonies in their struggle for survival, or for consumer websites to have the ability of offering hints to visiting customers depending on their past purchase history, this new kind of science, even at this early stage, is producing results worth noting.

Since emergence, as a science, can be hosted in so many different subjects, an interpretation of what it stands for comes in many different flavours. Three of the most common descriptions are that:

• bottom-up systems achieve the same functionality as top-down ones
• a set of simple rules generate complex behaviour
• the sum of the parts is greater than the whole

The above three interpretations of such phenomena briefly summarise the distinct behaviour that allow the categorisation of a system as one that hosts or experiences an emergent behaviour. Consequently, the system under investigation achieves a state that it would not be able to reach otherwise. The question arises as to what systems and under what conditions can such behaviour be introduced to a system, thus exploiting any of the above advantages. Work in the group seeks to identify emergent criteria in wireless routing protocols concentrating in the most dynamic network topology, that of the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), where an information exchange network is formed as a collection of wireless mobile nodes that dynamically change location. Furthermore, the the potential advantages that emergence might be able to present in wireless routing techniques are under investigation.