GoPrime: a fully decentralized middleware for utility-aware service assembly

Modern applications, e.g., for pervasive computing scenarios, are increasingly reliant on systems built from multiple distributed components, which must be suitably composed to meet some specified functional and non-functional requirements. A key challenge is how to efficiently and effectively manage such complex systems. The use of self-management capabilities has been suggested as a possible way to address this challenge. To cope with the scalability and robustness issues of large distributed systems, self-management should ideally be architected in a decentralized way, where the overall system behavior emerges from local decisions and interactions. Within this context, we propose GOPRIME, a fully decentralized middleware solution for the adaptive self-assembly of distributed services. The GOPRIME goal is to build and maintain an assembly of services that, besides functional requirements, fulfils also global quality-of-service and structural requirements. The key aspect of GOPRIME is the use of a gossip protocol to achieve decentralized information dissemination and decision making. To show the validity of our approach, we present results from the experimentation of a prototype implementation of GOPRIME in a mobile health application, and an extensive set of simulation experiments that assess the effectiveness of GOPRIME in terms of scalability, robustness and convergence speed.