Paul Grace, Danny Hughes, Barry Porter, Gordon S. Blair, Geoff Coulson, and François Taïani

Experiences with open overlays: a middleware approach to network heterogeneity

Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008 (Eurosys'08), Glasgow, Scotland UK, Mars, pp. 123-136, ISBN 978-1-60558-013-5, ACM, 2008 (14p.)

Abstract
In order to provide an increasing number of functionalities and benefit from sophisticated and application-tailored services from the network, distributed applications are led to integrate an ever-widening range of networking technologies. As these applications become more complex, this requirement for 'network heterogeneity' is becoming a crucial issue in their development. Although progress has been made in the networking community in addressing such needs through the development of network overlays, we claim in this paper that the middleware community has been slow to integrate these advances into middleware architectures, and, hence, to provide the foundational bedrock for heterogeneous distributed applications. In response, we propose our 'open overlays' framework. This framework, which is part of a wider middleware architecture, accommodates 'overlay plug-ins', allows physical nodes to support multiple overlays, supports the stacking of overlays to create composite protocols, and adopts a declarative approach to configurable deployment and dynamic reconfigurability. The framework has been in development for a number of years and supports an extensive range of overlay plug-ins including popular protocols such as Chord and Pastry. We report on our experiences with the open overlays framework, evaluate it in detail, and illustrate its application in a detailed case study of network heterogeneity.

ACM Copyright Notice: © ACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Sigops/Eurosys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008 (Glasgow, Scotland UK, April 01 - 04, 2008).

complete document

doi: http://doi.org/10.1145/1352592.1352606 (publisher's link)

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