Today's Paper: Service-Oriented Network Sockets

Abstraction is good thing if it is done in an appropriate way. If the world shifted to service-orientation, its details should be transparent, that is, abstracted. A new programming model is an easy way to do so, but there is a challenging way to archieve it within a network layer. Umar Saif et al. give us a good introduction to thread a thorny path to heaven.

Umar Saif and Justin Mazzola Paluska, Service-Oriented Network Sockets, In Proc. of MobiSys'03. [link(Abstract/PDF/HTML)]

Title:
Service-Oriented Network Sockets

Abstract:
This paper presents the design and implementation of service-oriented network sockets (SoNS) for accessing services in a dynamically changing networked environment. A service-oriented network socket takes a high-level description of a service and opportunistically connects to the best provider of that service in the changing characteristics of a mobile system. An application states its high-level service requirements as a set of constraints on the properties required in a suitable resource and SoNS continuously monitors, evaluates and compares the available resources and (re-)connects to the resource that best satisfies the specified constraints.

Unlike content-based routing systems, SoNS is an end-host system, interposed at the session-binding layer, and offers connection-oriented semantics. SoNSﾕ interface allows an application to tailor the planning policy used to establish and rebind a network session. SoNS is based on an extensible architecture to leverage the wide-range of emerging technologies for discovering and locating resources in a mobile system.

SoNS integrates a service-oriented abstraction with the traditional operating system interface for accessing network services, making it simpler to develop pervasive, mobile applications. We present an implementation for a mobile handheld device, analyze the performance of our system and describe an application to demonstrate the utility of our system.