Dissemination of Reconfiguration Policies on Mesh Networks

Component-based platforms are widely used to develop and deploy distributed pervasive system that exhibit a high degree of dynamicity, concurrency, distribution, heterogeneity, and volatility. This paper deals with the problem of ensuring safe yet efficient dynamic adaptation in a distributed and volatile environment. Most current platforms provide capabilities for dynamic local adaptation to adapt these systems to their evolving execution context, but are still limited in their ability to handle distributed adaptations. Thus, a remaining challenge is to safely propagate reconfiguration policies of component-based systems to ensure consistency of the architecture configuration models over a dynamic and distributed system. In this paper we implement a specific algorithm relying on the models at runtime paradigm to manage platform independent models of the current system architecture and its deployed configuration, and to propagate reconfiguration policies. We evaluate a combination of gossip-based algorithms and vector clock techniques that are able to propagate these policies safely in order to preserve consistency of architecture configuration models among all computation nodes of the system. This evaluation is done with a test-bed system running on a large size grid network.