Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked
devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at many
levels, from the globalInternetdowntomicroandnanodevices.
Manyofthesedevicesarehighly mobile and autonomous and must adapt to the
surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way. A fundamental
research challenge is the design of robust decentralized c- puting
systemsthat arecapableofoperating in changing environmentsandwith noisy
input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under c-
straints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power. These
systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen
scenarios as well as to display properties comparable to social
entities. The observation of nature has brought us many great and
unforeseen concepts. Biological systems are able to handle many of these
challenges with an elegance and e?ciency far beyond
currenthumanartifacts. Basedonthisobservation,
bio-inspiredapproacheshave been proposed as a means of handling the
complexity of such systems. The goal is to obtain methods to engineer
technical systems, which are of a stability and e?ciency comparable to
those found in biological entities. This Special Issue on Biological and
Biologically-inspired Communication contains the best papers from the
Second International Conference on Bio- Inspired Models of Network,
Information, and Computing Systems (BIONET- ICS 2007). The BIONETICS
conference aims to bring together researchers and
scientistsfromseveraldisciplines incomputerscienceandengineeringwhereb-
inspired methods are investigated, as well as from bioinformatics, to
deepen the information exchange and collaboration among the di?erent
communities
