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IP5 - Self-organized Distributed Applications in a Mobile Environment

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Introduction

General description:

Mobile ad-hoc-networks will be complex, self-organizing, decentralized communication systems. Consequently, applications running on top of this network infrastructure will need to follow the principle of self-organization in order to provide the necessary scalability and adaptability to dynamically changing resource availability and application requirements. To enable self-organization of applications they need to be enabled to flexibly configure and re-organize themselves exploiting mobility. We investigate this for the three key aspects of distributed, mobile applications:
(1) Information Management; location of data in a mobile environment, scalable distributed data access structure to support efficient search, and metadata management to support intelligent control and adaptation
(2) Programming; mobility of code for flexibly deploying applications
(3) Communication; configurable, asynchronous communication infrastructures based on publish/subscribe. The complex system modeling activities explore the techniques necessary to specify and design complex systems considering all 3 aspects. The approach taken is to map application requirements into executable application configurations based on behavioral and environmental contracts.
To ensure scalability, we use distributed and decentralized algorithms to control the configuration and behavior of applications. The algorithms employ different principles enabling self-organization, such as declarative, goal-oriented specifications of behavior, randomization, market or social paradigms of interaction. Mobile ecommerce will provide a common key application scenario to evaluate the methods developed. To that end we will develop methods for supporting spatial semantic services for mobile users.
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