A distributed alerting service for open digital library software

Alerting for Digital Libraries (DL) is an important and useful feature for the library users. To date, two independent services and a few publisher-hosted proprietary services have been developed. Here, we address the problem of integrating alerting as functionality into open source software for distributed digital libraries. DL software is one application out of many that constitute so-called meta-software: software where its installation determines the properties of the actual running system (here: the Digital Library system). For this type of application, existing alerting solutions are insufficient; new ways have to be found for supporting a fragmented network of distributed digital library servers. We propose the design and usage of a distributed Directory Service. This paper also introduces our hybrid approach using two networks and a combination of different distributed routing strategies for event filtering

Distributed Service Discovery for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Service discovery in heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks is a challenging research objective, due to the inherent limitations of sensor nodes and their extensive and dense deployment. The protocols proposed for ad hoc networks are too heavy for sensor environments. This paper presents a resourceaware solution for the service discovery problem, which exploits the heterogeneous nature of the sensor network and alleviates the high-density problem from the flood-based approaches. The idea is to organize nodes into clusters, based on the available resources and the dynamics of nodes. The clusterhead nodes act as a distributed directory of service registrations. Service discovery messages are exchanged among the nodes in the distributed directory. The simulation results show the performance of the service discovery protocol in heterogeneous dense environments

Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices

Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware

We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications, middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications. The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be configured.Comment: Submitted to Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems Track, ACM SAC 200

A Peer-to-Peer Middleware Framework for Resilient Persistent Programming

The persistent programming systems of the 1980s offered a programming model that integrated computation and long-term storage. In these systems, reliable applications could be engineered without requiring the programmer to write translation code to manage the transfer of data to and from non-volatile storage. More importantly, it simplified the programmer's conceptual model of an application, and avoided the many coherency problems that result from multiple cached copies of the same information. Although technically innovative, persistent languages were not widely adopted, perhaps due in part to their closed-world model. Each persistent store was located on a single host, and there were no flexible mechanisms for communication or transfer of data between separate stores. Here we re-open the work on persistence and combine it with modern peer-to-peer techniques in order to provide support for orthogonal persistence in resilient and potentially long-running distributed applications. Our vision is of an infrastructure within which an application can be developed and distributed with minimal modification, whereupon the application becomes resilient to certain failure modes. If a node, or the connection to it, fails during execution of the application, the objects are re-instantiated from distributed replicas, without their reference holders being aware of the failure. Furthermore, we believe that this can be achieved within a spectrum of application programmer intervention, ranging from minimal to totally prescriptive, as desired. The same mechanisms encompass an orthogonally persistent programming model. We outline our approach to implementing this vision, and describe current progress.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200