SLOSL--A Modelling Language for Topologies and Routing in Overlay Networks

Overlay networks are a fascinating field in the area of distributed systems. They combine challenges from self-organisation to extreme scalability and provide an interesting middleware layer for server-free Internet applications. The design aspects of their implementations, however, remained largely at the prototype level, which renders their integration and deployment in real applications hard. This paper describes an integrative, platform independent design approach for overlay networks that models topologies as data management systems. Local decisions about neighbours and message forwarding are expressed in an SQL-like language. The mapping to runnable implementations follows the model driven architecture approach