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research:ambientrefs

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Ambient References

ambientrefs.jpg

Ambient references are a novel remote object reference mechanism. Remote object references are “pointers across the network” and are a frequently recurring abstraction in both distributed OO languages and distributed middleware. Ambient references are designed to refer to objects in mobile networks. What exactly constitutes a mobile network and how it differs from traditional, stationary networks is described elsewhere.

Motivation

One may wonder why new referencing abstractions are required for mobile networks. In order to motivate the need for new referencing abstractions at the language level, we list a number of desirable properties of remote references for mobile networks which current remote referencing abstractions do not offer:

  1. Provisional References: remote references should be able to point to remote objects which are “not yet available” in the network. This is founded on the observation that in mobile networks, ambient resources need to be discovered in the environment and will most likely be unavailable most of the time.
  2. Resilience to Partial Failure: remote references for mobile networks should be able to tolerate network disconnections because of the volatile connnections hardware phenomenon of mobile networks.
  3. Transitory Addressing: remote references in mobile networks should bind to (point to) objects based on what services that object provides, rather than based on a low-level UID, object-id, IP address or MAC address. Such low-level IDs preclude the reference from reconfiguring itself by rebinding to a different object providing the same or equally matching services.
  4. Group Communication: in mobile networks, one often wants to communicate with an entire group of objects. To this end, remote references should be introduced that automatically represent a set of (proximate) objects. Messages sent to such references are automatically multicast or broadcast to all objects in the set.

Design

Ambient references unify two concepts: they are both a peer-to-peer discovery channel and an asynchronous communication channel to a remote object. When an ambient reference is unbound (i.e. it is a dangling pointer), it is acting as a discovery channel, actively looking for remote service objects in the environment to bind to. Once such a suitable 1) service object is found, the ambient reference becomes bound. Once bound, an ambient reference is a true remote object reference to the remote service. An ambient reference carries asynchronous message sends only.

When the service object to which an ambient reference is bound moves out of communication range, the ambient reference can become unbound again. It becomes a dangling pointer anew and immediately becomes a peer discovery mechanism again: the ambient reference will try to rebind to the same or another matching service.

Describing services

An ambient reference is always initialized with a service type which denotes remote objects intensionally by the service it provides. One may, for example, declare an ambient reference to a nearby printer:

printer = ambient Printer;

The code excerpt above creates an ambient reference to an object providing the Printer service and stores it in the variable named printer. This code assumes that remote service objects publish their printing services using the Printer type. Ambient references bind to remote objects when the type they require is the same or a subtype of the providing object (e.g. the above printer ambient reference may bind to a ColorPrinter if that type is a subtype of Printer).

The primary advantage of using such service types rather than e.g. name servers, IP addresses or URLs is, evidently, abstraction over the machine address of the host providing the services. Ambient references can be used to refer to service objects, the host address of which is unknown to the code declaring the reference. All that needs to be agreed upon is a matching service type.

Communicating with services

Asynchronous messages may be sent to an ambient reference at any point in time. For example, in order to print a document on a nearby printer, the printer ambient reference may be sent a message as follows:

printer<-print(document);

In this example code denotes asynchronous message passing. The message passing semantics is as follows: if the ambient reference is unbound when it receives the print message, the message is buffered and kept for later forwarding; if the ambient reference is bound, it immediately forwards the message to its bound service object. Using these basic parameter passing semantics, a programming may safely abstract from the internal state of the ambient reference: even if the reference is unbound at the time it receives the message, it is smart enough to store the message and forward it whenever a matching service is found.

One may wonder how return values can be acquired from such asynchronous message sends. We use the concept of a future, which is a very well known concept that unifies asynchronous message passing with return values. More specifically, the futures employed in the language AmbientTalk are based on the non-blocking futures of the E programming language. For more details, we refer to the paper below, but as a teaser, here's how one can notify the user when the print job has been sent:

answer = printer<-print(document);
when(answer) lambda(ok) -> {
  if (ok)
    print("document successfully transmitted");
}
Synchronising with the ambient

Sometimes it is useful to know when a matching service has become available and to act upon that event. Equally useful is the ability to act upon the unavailability of a previously discovered service. Ambient references cater to such behaviour by providing for a number of observers which can monitor the state of the reference. Reusing the printer example, here's how one can keep a list of nearby printing services up-to-date:

printer = ambient Printer;
printers = [];
when-found(printer) lambda(foundService) {
  printers.add(foundService)
}
when-lost(printer) lambda(lostService) {
  printers.remove(lostService)
}

The when-found and when-lost clauses each register an observer function with the ambient reference. Whenever the ambient reference becomes bound or unbound, the corresponding observer functions are invoked, leading to the desired behaviour.

Design Dimensions

One may notice from the above description of ambient references that their behaviour of binding and rebinding is not always what is desired. Furthermore, sometimes one may want to refer to more than just one single remote service; i.e. group communication is required. In fact, there is more to ambient references than currently meets the eye. There are three design dimensions along which you, as a developer, can change the behaviour of ambient references:

  • Scope of binding: it is possible to restrict the set of remote service objects to which an ambient reference may bind even further, by using so-called filter queries. For example, suppose one only wants to send documents to a printer that supports a resolution greater than 400 dpi. This can be expressed as:
printer = ambient Printer p where p.dpi > 400;
  • Elasticity: it is possible to specify that an ambient reference should “keep its connection alive” for a certain time period even after its remote service object has moved out of range. For example, one may declare an ambient reference to a printer that will not rebind to another printer unless disconnected for longer than one minute:
printer = ambient(1min) Printer;
  • Cardinality: it is possible to declare an ambient reference that points to a group of objects or even to all objects of a certain kind available in the environment. For example, one may send a message to “all nearby cars” as follows:
cars = ambient* Car;
cars<-getSpeedAndSteeringAngle();

For more details regarding all of these design dimensions, have a look at the further reading section below.

In conclusion, what is important to recall is that an ambient reference is a remote object reference that may be in two states: it can be unbound, searching for a matching object or it can be bound, becoming an asynchronous communication channel to a remote object. The programmer can tweak what objects can be bound to, how long it should bind with an object and how many objects an ambient reference can bind to simultaneously.

Implementation

A detailed explanation of ambient references can be found in this technical report.

Further Reading

Ambient References: Addressing Objects in Mobile Networks. Tom Van Cutsem, Jessie Dedecker, Stijn Mostinckx, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Theo D'Hondt, Wolfgang De Meuter. In Technical Report VUB-PROG-TR-06-10, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2006 [ download ]

Also see the Posters section for a poster describing ambient references graphically.

1)
What exactly constitutes a “suitable” service is discussed later.
research/ambientrefs.1152645615.txt.gz · Last modified: 2006/11/09 15:19 (external edit)