Middleware for supporting content sharing in dynamic networks

This paper proposes a middleware architecture to enable seamless content sharing in highly dynamic networks, such as those involving a number of aerial unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), which are characterized by constantly changing connectivity and network topology. The proposed middleware maintains up-to-date network status as well as metadata information about data objects in the network nodes, masking the content sharing applications from the network dynamics and faults. Mechanisms for node discovery, message passing and network management are developed. A strategy is also proposed for efficient replication to ensure availability of data in highly mobile environments. The middleware includes a message acknowledgement strategy that can be used on top of UDP for reliable communication in volatile wireless environments. Furthermore, the middleware supports database queries in changing networks. In the future, proposed middleware will be utilized for fault-tolerant database query processing.