Edinburgh Napier University

  Speckled Computing offers a radically new concept in information technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate and exchange information. Specks — minute, autonomous, semi-conductor grains that can sense and compute locally and communicate wirelessly — can be sprayed into the atmosphere, onto surfaces or onto people, and will collaborate as programmable computational networks called SpeckNets which will pave the way to the goal of truly ubiquitous computing. Such is the vision of the Speckled Computing Project — however, although the technology to build such devices is advancing at a rapid rate, the software that will enable such networks to self-organise and function lags somewhat behind. In this paper, we present a framework for a self-organising SpeckNet based on Cohen’s model of the immune system. We further suggest that the application of immune inspired technologies to the rapidly growing field of pervasive computation in general, offers a distinctive niche for immune-inspired computing which cannot be filled by another other known technology to date.