MICS messaging platform: Architecture, design and routing

The Multi Interface Communications Software (MICS) is a robust messaging platform for heterogeneous communications equipment. MICS can provide message delivery in networks that lack essentials required by traditional TCP/IP-solutions, like end-to-end connectivity or compatible addressing methods. MICS abstracts the used communications medium, that is the network and link layer, from applications. Applications and network interfaces connect to MICS core using well known and standardized APIs. MICS is a modular software platform, each module has a clear purpose and used modules communicate over D-Bus. Familiar email addresses and APIs are used to interface applications with the MICS system. The high-level operation of MICS resembles Delay Tolerant Networking since we make use of store-and-forward message delivery and multipath message routing together with flooding. This paper concentrates on the overall concept of the MICS system, software architecture, IPC methods, details design choices, message routing and discusses real world deployment scenarios.