Location Independent Routing in Process Network Overlays

In distributed computing, location transparency -- the decoupling of objects, tasks, and virtual machines from their physical location -- is desirable in that it can simplify application development and management, and enable load balancing and efficient resource allocation. Many existing systems for location transparency are built on top of TCP/IP. We argue that addressing mobile objects in terms of the host where they temporarily reside may not be the best design decision. When objects can migrate, it becomes necessary to use a dedicated routing infrastructure to deliver inter-object messages, such as location servers or forwarding chains. This incurs high costs in terms of complexity, overhead, and latency. In this paper, we defer object overlay routing to an underlying networking layer, by assuming a location independent routing scheme in place of TCP/IP. In this scheme, messages are directed to destinations determined by flat identifiers instead of IP addresses. Consequently, messages are delivered directly to a recipient object, instead of a possibly out-of-date location. We explore the scheme in the context of a small object-based language with asynchronous message passing, in the style of core Erlang. We provide a standard, network-oblivious operational semantics of this language, and a network-aware semantics which takes many aspects of distribution and message routing into account. The main result is that execution of a program on top of an abstract network of processing nodes connected by asynchronous point-to-point communication channels preserves the network-oblivious behavior in a sound and fully abstract way, in the sense of contextual equivalence. This is a novel and strong result for such a low-level model. Previous work has addressed distributed implementations only in terms of fully connected TCP underlays. But in this setting, contextual equivalence is typically too strong, due to the need for locking to resolve preemption arising from object mobility.