Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways and at multiple scales, from the global Internet down to micro and nano devices. Many of these devices are highly mobile and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way.

A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized computing systems that are capable of operating under changing environments and noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under constraints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power.

Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and efficiency still far beyond current human artifacts. The goal is to obtain methods on how to engineer technical systems, which have similar high stability and efficiency.

With this book, we present a comprehensive overview of the most promising research directions in the area of bio-inspired computing. According to the broad spectrum addressed by the different book chapters, a rich variety of biological principles and their application to ICT systems are presented.

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways and at multiple scales, from the global Internet down to micro and nano devices. Many of these devices are highly mobile and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way.

A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized computing systems that are capable of operating under changing environments and noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under constraints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power.

Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and efficiency still far beyond current human artifacts. The goal is to obtain methods on how to engineer technical systems, which have similar high stability and efficiency.

With this book, we present a comprehensive overview of the most promising research directions in the area of bio-inspired computing. According to the broad spectrum addressed by the different book chapters, a rich variety of biological principles and their application to ICT systems are presented.

This volume of LNICST is a collection of the papers of the 4th International Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (Bionetics). The event took place in the medieval city of Avignon, known also as the City of the Popes, during December 9 to 11, 2009. Bionetics main objective is to bring b- inspired paradigms into computer engineereing and networking, and to enhance the fruitful interactions between these fields and biology. The program of the conference indeed includes applications of various paradigms that have their origin in biology: population dynamics, branching processes, ant c- ony optimization. The proceedings include 19 papers covering a broad range of - portant issues in areas related to bio-inspired technologies. They correspond to pr- entations at 6 technical sessions. Four papers correspond to an invited session on the Epidemic-type forwarding in DTNs (sparse mobile ad-hoc wireless networks) org- ized by Dr Francesco De Pellegrini, (Italy, CREATE-NET). The following 9 papers (selected out of 15 submissions) correspond to contributions to regular sessions on Bio-inspired security, Bio-Inspired Networking, Bioinspired algorithms and software systems. The remaining 6 papers (selected out of a total of 9 submissions) are de- cated to work in progress. For each paper, we have provided at least two independent reviews, most of which were offered by members of the TPC.