Active names: flexible location and transport of wide-area resources

  • Authors:
  • Amin Vahdat;Michael Dahlin;Thomas Anderson;Amit Aggarwal

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Duke University;Department of Computer Science, University of Texas, Austin;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington

  • Venue:
  • USITS'99 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In this paper, we explore flexible name resolution as a way of supporting extensibility for wide-area distributed services. Our approach, called Active Names, maps names to a chain of mobile programs that can customize how a service is located and how its results are transformed and transported back to the client. To illustrate the properties of our system, we implement prototypes of server selection based on end-to-end performance measurements, location-independent data transformation, and caching of composable active objects and demonstrate up to a five-fold performance improvement to end users. We show how these new services are developed, composed, and secured in our framework. Finally, we develop a set of algorithms to control how mobile Active Name programs are mapped onto available wide-area resources to optimize performance and availability.