FCPP: an efficient and extensible Field Calculus framework

Abstract

The Field Calculus is a promising language for the self-organisation of distributed devices, allowing to express on a high level of abstraction complex distributed algorithms with robust behaviour guarantees. This language has been argued to be fruitfully applicable to many different contexts: wireless sensor networks, internet of things, self-organising edge, fog or cloud computing scenarios, and simulations of such. However, existing implementations of this language rely on the Java Virtual Machine and have an high performance overhead, impairing their usability in contexts where performance is critical (cloud) or computational resources are tightly bounded (WSN/IoT).In this paper we present FCPP, a novel implementation of the Field Calculus as a C++ library. The library is built as a component-based system, in order to be easily extensible to fit different contexts. Furthermore, it leverages C++ template patterns to allow compile-time optimisation and minimal performance overhead, and enables fine-grained parallelism for scalability in self-organising cloud applications. A case study of an edge simulation shows the performance improvement compared to existing Field Calculus implementations, while preserving the same level of abstraction. This translates to a significant speed-up in the development process of distributed algorithms, paving the way towards application scenarios for which existing tools are unsuitable: microcontroller systems and self-organising cloud.