Experiences With Open Overlays: A Middleware Approach to Network Heterogeneity

In order to provide an increasing number of functionalities and benefit from sophisticated and application-tailored services from the network, distributed applications are led to integrate an ever widening range of networking technologies. As these applications become more complex, this requirement for 'Network heterogeneity' is becoming a crucial issue in their development. Although progress has been made in the networking community in addressing such needs through the development of network overlays, the authors claim in this paper that the middleware community has been slow to integrate these advances into middleware architectures, and, hence, to provide the foundational bedrock for heterogeneous distributed applications.