IRTL (Information Resource Transaction Layer) Middleware Design for P2P and Open GRID Services

Peer-to-peer computing is a remarkable tool that has emerged in recent years, most notably in the form of music sharing services, but in a variety of other interesting guises as well. Just as the design of web browsers has required many generations to reach a certain level of usefulness and usability, service designs for peer-to-peer computing environments present numerous unresolved technical challenges. A central challenge lies in the management, sharing, and exchange of heterogeneous resources that reside across any highly distributed, “leaderless” peer-to-peer environment. In future p2p computing scenarios, these heterogeneous resources will naturally include the basic building blocks of communications bandwidth, data storage, and computational power but eventually will also include more abstract resources such as databases, directories, catalogs, resource maps, security keys, identities, membership lists, price lists and many other information resources. In this paper we present an IRTL (Information Resource Transaction Layer) middleware architecture that addresses some of the technical challenges associated with heterogeneous resource transactions in the p2p-computing environment. This IRTL will facilitate discovery, valuation, negotiation, coordination, charging and exchange of resources among peer users as a middleware platform. The proposed ITRL will provide an adaptive service that integrates heterogeneous peer-based resources through a service interface independent of any particular system. This paper demonstrates the architecture and design of the IRTL and its mechanisms and protocols for information transaction. By marrying recently developed information resource description facilities with generic functional middleware managers, it presents a middleware service layer with rich support for information resource transactions and resolution. We conclude by discussing the applications and services of the IRTL middleware in the context of the p2p computing, the GRID, and context-aware services.