IBN

[With Liviu Iftode, Associate Professor, Dept of Computer Science, Rutgers University, USA]

For more details, visit IBN Project Web Site

In this work we consider the design principles of the Instance-Based Network (IBN), an extended version of a generic Content-Based Network (CBN). IBN acts as an overlay communication platform over which end-point entities, called contents, communicate independently from their physical locations while providing the flexibility of having different instances of the same content. The semantics of different instances are assigned by the application using the IBN. Routing in the IBN is instance-based; the IBN can route a message to a specific content instance or to the closest instance, if no exact match is found for the destination content instance. Moreover, the IBN replicates the stored contents in order to provide fault tolerance. 

Possible applications for the IBN applications include:

peer-to-peer anycasting where a service is defined by a content ID (service name) and different instances of the same service represent nodes offering the same service. The instance identifier is used to select the closest node to the requesting node depending on some metric. 

 a pervasive environment, e.g. the Autonomous Transport Protocol (ATP), where application endpoints are defined by content IDs. Applications can migrate from one node to the other and the established communication connections should continue transparently without interruption. Different agents from the same application (instances) work on behalf of the application on different nodes to maintain the connection.

 a file archiving system over a peer-to-peer network. Files in this system are defined by content identifiers and the system keeps track of different versions of the same file. A user of such a system can request to retrieve a specific version of the file or can request the latest version stored in the system. The file archiving system is an example of a larger class of peer-to-peer applications where entities (files in the file archiving system) are defined by content identifiers (file names) and different instances (file versions) of the same content can exist at the same time.

We have developed an implementation prototype based on Pastry as the underlying peer-to-peer lookup service.

Currently, we are working on evaluating the performance of the IBN, implementing applications over it, and experimenting with different underlying infrastructures. 

For more details, visit IBN Project Web Site