A Shared Global Event Propagation System to Enable Next Generation Distributed Services

The construction of highly reliable planetary-scale distributed services in the unreliable Internet environment entails significant challenges. Our research focuses on the use of loose binding among service components as a means to deploy distributed services at scale. An event-based publish/subscribe messaging infrastructure is the principal means through which we implement loose binding. A unique property of the messaging infrastructure is that it is built on a collection of off-the-shelf instant messaging servers running on PlanetLab. Using this infrastructure we have successfully constructed long-running services (such as a PlanetLab node status service) with more than 2000 components.