GUMP: adapting client/server messaging protocols into peer-to-peer serverless environments

In this paper we present a generic environment for creating message-oriented server-side proxies to support adaptation from TCP transport-oriented client-server sessions to many-to-many peer-to-peer networking environments more suitable for deployment in dynamic wireless networks, capable of multicast forwarding. At its input, GUMP provides an interface for exposing network server implementations in order to allow existing GUI applications to connect to GUMP. At the back-end, GUMP's generic service discovery and multicast interfaces allow access to multiple implementations, enabling the discovery of necessary services on the network, maintenance of the network state, and transport of messages amongst peers, for tuning to a specific network environment. At the heart of GUMP, there is a mechanism for selecting a server-side proxy implementation for a given messaging protocol, allowing multiple proxies to co-exist and run time adaption of the system. As a primary example and use case, we show how GUMP has been used to implement an XMPP proxy allowing existing off-the-shelf XMPP client software to dynamically create and operate multi-user chat sessions in a serverless network environment. This resulting proxy integration demonstrates the power of GUMP in its ability to adapt between different methods of input using either HTTP or TCP oriented server systems, the use of its different discovery subsystem bindings (SLPv2 and JmDNS), and its support for multicast architectures. GUMP therefore allows a single messaging protocol server-side implementation to be dynamically adapted to suit a particular distributed wireless deployment environment at run time.