Experiences with open overlays: A middleware approach to network heterogeneity

Paul Grace*, Danny Hughes, Barry Porter, Gordon S. Blair, Geoff Coulson, Francois Taiani

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEuroSys'08 - Proceedings of the EuroSys 2008 Conference
PublisherACM
Pages123-136
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9781605580135
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2008
Event3rd ACM European Conference on Computer Systems - EuroSys'08 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 31 Mar 20084 Apr 2008

Conference

Conference3rd ACM European Conference on Computer Systems - EuroSys'08
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period31/03/084/04/08

Keywords

  • Framework
  • Middleware
  • Overlay network
  • WSN

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