Autonomic Application-Level Message Delivery Using Virtual Magnetic Fields

Mobility has emerged as an important new trend in the arena of distributed computing bringing along deep social and technical transformations. These changes have created an increasing demand for applications and middleware that exploit and support mobility. This article proposes the use of the concept of magnetic fields borrowed from physics to enable self-organizing message forwarding on overlay networks over physical networks with possibly mobile nodes. Though autonomic, a network that employs the proposed message forwarding mechanism still needs a cognitive management to accomplish end-to-end goals. After formalizing the generic model of virtual magnetic fields, a distributed self-stabilizing propagation algorithm is defined and applied to the load-balancing problem. Simulation results are then discussed and implementation issues are detailed considering extensions of existing platforms. At last, conclusions are drawn and the main future works are listed.