Listening to my local NPR station, I was fascinated to hear about a change in behavior by ant colonies in metropolitan areas. The discussion was about the Odorous House Ant or Tapinoma Sessile.

Now many of our friends in the industry are big on discussion about digital swarms and how the insect world has a lot of good metaphors for the way 4G technology is rolling out. For example, Bridgewater Systems uses the analogy to talk about how it manages the routing of traffic via policy, Author Scott Snyder wrote his book on 4G entitled “The New World of Wireless; How to Compete in the 4G Revolution (News - Alert)” based on scenario planning for the trends toward enabling productivity vs. the securing of privacy.

So the Ordorous House Ant has been in the country in very small colonies. These colonies normally don’t get much larger than 50 females with one queen. (I have asked about the lack of a male and I have been assured he is not needed). If this colony were to meet an ant from another colony they would smell a difference and war would breakout.

However give this ant and urban area to live and all of a sudden detante of a sort exists.

What happens is the colonies become super colonies where several queens keep the population up and everyone works for the common good. The supercolony is somewhat distributed with some of the queens in different sections, but they share the same scent.

While the data is somewhat inconclusive to the biologist, I see this as a good analogy for some of the issues we face in delivering services for machine to machine systems.

Self organized network should be flexible enough for more than one homing center to exist that allows for better contingency planning. While the biologists try to figure out why the ants work this way, I am hoping we can prove we can be as adaptive.