Federated name resolution.

Abstract

The naming service is a central component for a distributed system. In this thesis it is investigated the creation of a highly scalable, federated, distributed and load balanced name resolution system supporting persistent names in a flat namespace. A new federation technique is proposed and applied for solving the name resolution problem in a flat namespace. The new federation algorithm proposed in this thesis is based on mapping a set of servers (and their names) into a set of nodes in a graph. Another mapping assigns names to a geometric net where each server manages a local set of nodes representing neighbor names. To retrieve a server reference or resolve a name, a hill climbing like technique is applied. The set of federated servers exposing the same interfaces and having identical implementation operate on the namespace distributed database. Mobile agents are used for the federation server's deployment, link construction and link update. Two implementations of a subset of this federated name resolution system one using Orbix, a CORBA compliant product, and another in Voyager, a standard neutral ORB for mobile computing, are provided as a proof of concept. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)