Starlink: Runtime Interoperability between Heterogeneous Middleware Protocols

—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 pro...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Yérom-David Bromberg, Paul Grace, Laurent Réveillère
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Generic Parser, ICDCS 2011, Line Protocol, Remote Method Invocation