Adlets migration and handling in a distributed object environment

Large distributed systems may contain millions of objects that have to be managed. This makes it impossible to specify management policies for individual objects. Instead it is necessary to specify policy for groups of objects. This paper describes a framework for the construction of the ADlets Distributed Migration Mechanism (ADDMM), which is used by the Adlet System for the management of adlets. The Adlet System is a new approach for multimedia information retrieval and fusion based on the concept of active document advertising, whereby an adlet (the metadata of a document) travels in the network to seek out documents of interest to the parent document, and at the same time advertises its parent document to other interested adlets. ADDMM provides the Adlet System with the facility of managing migrating adlets. ADDMM supports location-independent transparency and minimal interface by utilizing the ADDNS naming system that provides a mechanism for transparent naming and locating adlets, which in turn supports ADDMM transparency at the adlet access level. With the ADDMM migration mechanism, various adlet migration protocols can be constructed and deployed. A visual diagram is introduced to specify such protocols for adlets migration, which can also be employed to specify distributed object management policies.