Service Clouds: Distributed Infrastructure for Adaptive Communication Services

This paper describes service clouds, a distributed infrastructure designed to facilitate rapid prototyping and deployment of adaptive communication services. The infrastructure combines adaptive middleware functionality with an overlay network substrate in order to support dynamic instantiation and reconfiguration of services. The service clouds architecture includes a collection of low-level facilities that can be invoked directly by applications or used to compose more complex services. After describing the service clouds architecture, we present results of experimental case studies conducted on the PlanetLab Internet testbed alone and a mobile computing testbed.