Starlink:Runtime interoperability between heterogeneous middleware protocols

Abstract

Interoperability remains a challenging and growing problem within distributed systems. A range of heterogeneous network and middleware protocols which cannot interact with one another are now widely used; for example, the set of remote method invocation protocols, and the set of service discovery protocols. In environments where systems and services are composed dynamically, e.g. pervasive computing and systems-of-systems, the protocols used by two systems wishing to interact is unknown until runtime and hence interoperability cannot be guaranteed. In such situations, dynamic solutions are required to identify the differences between heterogeneous protocols and generate middleware connectors (or bridges) that will allow the systems to interoperate. In this paper, we present the Starlink middleware, a general framework into which runtime generated interoperability logic (in the form of higher level models) can be deployed to'connect'two heterogeneous protocols. For this, it provides: i) an abstract representation of network messages with a corresponding generic parser and composer, ii) an engine to execute coloured automata that represent the required interoperability behaviour between protocols, and iii) translation logic to describe the exchange of message content from one protocol to another. We show through case-study based evaluation that Starlink can bridge heterogeneous protocol types. Starlink is also compared against base-line protocol benchmarks to show that acceptable performance can still be achieved in spite of the high-level nature of the solution.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS.2011.65
Additional Information: © 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Event Title: 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2011
Event Type: Other
Event Dates: 2011-06-20 - 2011-07-24
Uncontrolled Keywords: Software,Hardware and Architecture,Computer Networks and Communications
ISBN: 9780769543642
Last Modified: 05 Feb 2024 08:06
Date Deposited: 09 Jan 2020 15:47
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://ieeexpl ... ocument/5961699 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Conference contribution
Published Date: 2011-08-25
Authors: Bromberg, Yérom David
Grace, Paul (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-2363-0630)
Réveillère, Laurent

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