Reconfiguration Service for Publish/Subscribe Middleware

Mission-critical, distributed systems are often designed as a set of distributed, components that interact using publish/subscribe middleware. Currently, in these systems, software components are usually statically allocated to the nodes to fulfil predictability, reliability requirements. However, a static allocation of components has major drawbacks, e.g. the need for quantification of the expenditure of resources to prevent a lack of resources during runtime. A dynamic allocation diminishes the drawbacks of a static allocation by reallocating components during system run-time. The process of dynamic reallocation is considered as a reconfiguration of the system, which can be implemented as an additional functionality of the middleware. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic reconfiguration service for a publish/subscribe middleware that enables dynamic reallocation of components in order to achieve predictable and reliable system behaviour and fulfil deployment requirements. We have built a prototype that validates our research.