A Middleware Architecture for Scalable, QoS-Aware, and Self-Organizing Global Services

Globally distributed services need more than location transparency. An implementation of such a service has to scale to millions of users from all over the world. Those users may have different and varying quality-of-service requirements that have to be considered for an appropriate distribution and installation of service components. The service also has to scale to thousands of administrative domains hosting those components. AspectIX is a novel middleware architecture which extends CORBA by a partitioned object model. A globally distributed service can be completely encapsulated into a single distributed object which contains not only all necessary components for scalability (e.g., caches and replicas) but also the knowledge for self-organization and distribution of the service. For distribution and installation of components, the service considers object-external policies to achieve administrative scalability.