The following papers discuss various aspects of building flexible and adaptive communication systems, based on work performed as part of my doctoral research on the ADAPTIVE project in the Computer Network Research group headed by Tatsuya Suda at the University of Calfornia, Irvine.
Developing extensible, robust, and efficient distributed systems is a complex task. To help alleviate this complexity, we have developed the ADAPTIVE Service eXecutive (ASX) framework. ASX is an object-oriented framework composed of automated tools and reusable components. These tools and components help to simplify the development, configuration, and reconfiguration of applications in a distributed environment. Using the ASX framework, the services in the applications may be updated and extended without modifying, recompiling, relinking, or restarting the applications at run-time. This paper describes the features and object-oriented architecture of the ASX framework. It also describes how the ASX framework has been used to develop a highly modular, reusable, and dynamically reconfigurable family of distributed system management applications.
The next generation of communication subsystems must support diverse applications (such as interactive voice and video conferencing, supercomputer visualization, collaborative work, and remote process control) operating over high-performance local, metropolitan, and wide area networks (such as FDDI, SMDS, and B-ISDN). This paper describes a framework that contains a number of resources, languages, and tools for generating customized protocols that support diverse multimedia applications running on high-performance networks. This framework facilitates the configuration of application-tailored, function-based communication protocols that are automatically synthesized from high-level specifications. In addition, this framework also decouples the platform-independent aspects of protocol configuration from the platform-dependent aspects. This enables the generation of efficient protocols on a variety of hardware platforms that offer parallel processing based on shared memory and message passing architectures.
Next generation communication systems must support diverse applications operating over high-performance local, metropolitan, and wide area networks. This paper describes a framework that contains a number of resource, language, and tool components for generating customized protocols to support diverse multimedia applications running in high-performance network environments. These components help to simplify the process of generating application-tailored communication protocols by automating many development and configuration steps. A collaborative distance learning application scenario is presented to motivate and demonstrate techniques used to compose function-based protocols that are customized for particular application requirements. In addition, the structure of a protocol resource pool that contains reusable protocol function building-blocks is also examined.
Computer communication systems must undergo significant changes to keep pace with the increasingly demanding and diverse multimedia applications that will run on the next generation of high-performance networks. To facilitate these changes, we are developing ``A Dynamically Assembled Protocol Transformation, Integration, and eValuation Environment'' (ADAPTIVE). ADAPTIVE provides an integrated environment for developing and experimenting with flexible transport system architectures that support lightweight and adaptive communication protocols for diverse multimedia applications running on high-performance networks. Our approach employs a collection of reusable ``building block'' protocol mechanisms that may be composed together automatically based upon functional specifications. The resulting protocols execute in parallel on several target platforms including shared memory and message-passing multi-processors. ADAPTIVE provides a framework for (1) determining the functionality of customized lightweight protocol configurations that efficiently support multimedia applications and (2) mapping this functionality onto efficient parallel process architectures.
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Last modified 11:34:30 CDT 28 September 2006