ADAptive Middleware And Network Transports (ADAMANT)


Summary

Quality-of-service (QoS) enabled publish/subscribe (pub/sub) distributed, real-time, and embedded (DRE) systems often need to satisfy tradeoffs between multiple (often contentious) QoS demands e.g., security, timeliness, and reliability. These systems also need to regulate and adapt to (dis)continuous changes in runtime environments to support features such as online prognostics, dependable online upgrades, availability of mission critical tasks, and dynamic resource management.

In particular, as an operating environment changes, QoS mechanisms that were once adequate might no longer be effective thus failing to support specified QoS. Building on the work with FLEXMAT we are focusing on the particular QoS mechanisms of transport protocols. We are conducting research so that pub/sub middleware can autonomically adapt transport protocols to support QoS in dynamic environments. Our solution approach called ADAptive Middleware And Network Transports (ADAMANT) integrates and enhances QoS-enabled pub/sub middleware, a flexible network transport protocol framework, monitoring infrastructure, machine learning techniques, and a controller to support autonomic adaptation of QoS mechanisms for pub/sub DRE system in dynamic environments. We use the Data Distribution Service (DDS) as our initial pub/sub middleware since it provides fine-grained QoS policy control. DDS is a robust pub/sub API standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG). We have integrated and enhanced the OpenDDS and OpenSplice open source DDS implementations with an Adaptive Network Transports (ANT) framework and are currently focusing on the OpenSplice implementation due to its extensive commercial grade support of the DDS specification.

We are using the ANT framework to provide adaptability of transport protocols and protocol parameters. ANT is a multicast-based transport protocol framework that supports composable modules with particular properties (e.g., acknowledgment-based reliability, negative acknowledgment based reliability, lateral error correction, XOR data encoding). The modules in ANT can be reconfigured at run-time to provide transport protocol adaptability.


Status and Current Work

We are now integrating the various pieces of ADAMANT (as shown below) to implement an ADAMANT prototype for dynamic environments. We will then conduct experiments and collect performance data (e.g., measure the time taken from a change in the environment to a change in protocols).

The subversion URL for ADAMANT is located at: svn://svn.dre.vanderbilt.edu/DOC/ADAMANT.


ADAMANT Publications, Presentations, and Posters

  1. Joe Hoffert, Aniruddha Gokhale, and Douglas Schmidt, "Timely Autonomic Adaptation of Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Dynamic Environments", International Journal of Adaptive, Resilient and Autonomic Systems; Vol 2, Issue 4 (2011), pp. 1-24.

  2. Joe Hoffert, Douglas Schmidt, and Aniruddha Gokhale, "Evaluating Timeliness and Accuracy Trade-offs of Supervised Machine Learning for Adapting Enterprise DRE Systems in Dynamic Environments", International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, Volume 4, Issue 5 (2011), pp. 806-816.

  3. Joe Hoffert, Daniel Mack, and Douglas Schmidt, "Integrating Machine Learning Techniques to Adapt Protocols for QoS-enabled Distributed Real-time and Embedded Publish/Subscribe Middleware", International Journal of Network Protocols and Algorithms (NPA): Special Issue on Data Dissemination for Large-scale Complex Critical Infrastructures, Vol 2, No 3 (2010)

  4. Joe Hoffert, Douglas Schmidt, and Aniruddha Gokhale, "Adapting Distributed Real-time and Embedded Publish/Subscribe Middleware for Cloud-Computing Environments", Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2010), Bangalore, India, November 2010

  5. Joe Hoffert and Douglas Schmidt, "Evaluating Supervised Machine Learning for Adapting Enterprise DRE Systems", Proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Intelligence Information Processing and Trusted Computing (IPTC 2010), Huanggang, China, October 2010

  6. Joe Hoffert, Douglas Schmidt, and Annirudha Gokhale, "Adapting and Evaluating Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems in Dynamic Environments", The 1st International Workshop on Data Dissemination for Large scale Complex Critical Infrastructures (DD4LCCI 2010), Valencia, Spain, April 2010

  7. Joseph W. Hoffert, Daniel Mack, and Douglas Schmidt, "Using Machine Learning to Maintain Pub/Sub System QoS in Dynamic Environments", 8th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM) 2009, Urbana Champaign, IL, December 2009

  8. Joseph W. Hoffert and Douglas Schmidt, "Maintaining QoS for Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Dynamic Environments", Fast abstract for the 3rd ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS '09), Nashville, TN, USA, July 2009


ADAMANT Doctoral Consortia

  1. Joe Hoffert, "Evaluating and Adapting QoS for Distributed Real-time & Embedded Systems in Dynamic Environments", EuroSys 2010 Conference, doctoral symposium poster sesssion, Paris, France, April 2010

  2. Joseph W. Hoffert (Adviser: Douglas Schmidt), "Maintaining Publish/Subscribe Middleware QoS in Dynamic Environments", Doctoral and PhD Workshop for the 3rd ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS '09), Nashville, TN, USA, July 2009

  3. Joseph W. Hoffert (Adviser: Douglas Schmidt), "Maintaining QoS for Publish/Subscribe Middleware via Autonomic Adaptation", Doctoral Consortium for the 6th International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications, Barcelona, Spain, June 2009