DEEDS - A Distributed and Extensible Event Dissemination Service
Sep 2005
Event-driven programming is an established paradigm in software engineering. In Distributed Systems, events systems can be an effective tool for assembling complex distributed applications out of assorted software components. Events achieve their greatest potential when the quality of service of the communication channels closely matches the specific requirements of the applications. That is when the complexity inherent to quality of service can be completely abstracted and factored out of the application code, while incurring the least performance penalty.
In this dissertation we describe the research done on DEEDS - a distributed and extensible event dissemination service that proposes models to deliver event dissemination with abstract and generic quality of service guarantees; i.e., models that can potentially simplify the development of distributed event-based applications.
The generic event dissemination model proposed in DEEDS has been designed to target a wide range of application domains and distributed environments via customisation. DEEDS aims to offer to its applications tailored event delivery with the right quality of service, to relieve them from the burden of implementing it themselves and to improve performance, by avoiding the inevitable cost attached to excessive and unwanted guarantees. To that end, DEEDS employs the concept of active event channels backed by an active overlay networking architecture, which is powered by a library of plug-in QoS template modules that realise the extensible and generic character of the platform.
