Naming service in the distributed object environment for adlets (ADDNS)

Abstract

Naming is an important aspect of distributed system design. A naming system allows users and programs to assign symbolic names to objects, and subsequently use the names to refer to those objects. With the interconnection and sharing of computer resources in the distributed environment, the application/system domain over which naming systems must function is growing to encompass a wider area. This paper describes the motivations and the main features of ADDNS-A framework for the construction of the ADlets Distributed Naming Service (ADDNS). Adlet system is a new approach for the multimedia information retrieval and fusion based on the concept of active documents advertising, whereby an Adlet (the metadata of a document) travels in the network to seek out documents of interest to the parent document, and at the same time advertises its parent document to other interested Adlets. ADDNS provides the clients with a notion of an Adlet that hides the details of how and where an object is actually located in the network. ADDNS supports location independency, transparent migration, and replication transparency of Adlets in the system. The paper also describes the inter-object communication and the invocation mechanism used in the ADDNS. The ADDNS system is featured with a dynamic data structure that expends or shrinks according to the scale of the system component. Comparative algorithms for ADDNS approach with other naming approaches are also provided.