William Adjie-Winoto, Elliot Schwartz, Hari Balakrishnan, Jeremy Lilley
17th ACM Symposium on
Operating Systems Principles, Charleston, SC, December 1999
This paper presents the design and implementation of the Intentional
Naming System (INS), a resource discovery and service location system for
dynamic and mobile networks of devices and computers. Such environments
require a naming system that is (i) expressive, to describe and make requests
based on specific properties of services, (ii) responsive, to track changes
due to mobility and performance, (iii) robust, to handle failures, and
(iv) easily configurable. INS uses a simple language based on attributes
and values for its names. Applications use the language to describe what
they are looking for (i.e., their intent), not where to find things (i.e.,
not hostnames). INS implements a late binding mechanism that integrates
name resolution and message routing, enabling clients to continue communicating
with end-nodes even if the name-to-address mappings change while a session
is in progress. INS resolvers self-configure to form an application-level
overlay network, which they use to discover new services, perform late
binding, and maintain weak consistency of names using soft-state name exchanges
and updates. We analyze the performance of the INS algorithms and protocols,
present measurements of a Java-based implementation, and describe three
applications we have implemented that demonstrate the feasibility and utility
of INS.
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Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{adjie-winoto1999design,
author = "William Adjie-Winoto and Elliot Schwartz and Hari Balakrishnan and Jeremy Lilley",
title = "{The design and implementation of an intentional naming system}",
booktitle = {17th ACM Symposium on
Operating Systems Principles},
year = {1999},
month = {December},
address = {Charleston, SC}
}