Eline Philips

I am a PhD-student at the Software Languages Lab, which is part of the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

I am funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Flemish Institute for the Improvement of the Scientifical-Technological Research in the Industry (IWT).

Nomadic networks fill the gap between fixed networks and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) as they consist of a group of mobile devices that can move around dynamically while trying to maintain a connection with a fixed infrastructure. My research focusses on the coordination of nomadic services by making use of workflows as they provide an additional layer of abstraction such that interactions among application components can be specified on a higher level and be reused because of their loose coupling with the fine-grained application logic. Unfortunately, current workflow systems do not meet all the requirements for the kinds of applications that we envision in nomadic networks, like connection volatility.

AmbientTalk is a programming language which treats disconnections at the very heart of its computational model. Moreover, the language supports dynamic service discovery which is opportune for nomadic networks. Although this language is suited for writing applications for MANETs, the orchestration of these applications is still programmed in an ad hoc manner. Complex nomadic applications that consist of asynchronously executing distributed services become hard to develop, understand and reuse. I am currently working on the addition of an abstraction layer on top of AmbientTalk which implements workflow patterns. I am investigating which new patterns for nomadic networks can be added to this abstraction layer. Concretely, I want support for intensional descriptions of services, group communication, compensating actions and more advanced synchronisation.