Proxy-based services in Distributed Systems

In today’s vast and heterogeneous environment, new technologies and services are emerging at an extremely rapid pace. Many of these cutting-edge technologies cannot be easily incorporated into the present network infrastructure. Their deployment requires significant changes in the current infrastructure, which may not be feasible, because of the scale of infrastructure in place. Eventually, the existing network protocols will evolve to support most of the emerging technologies; yet it will be almost impossible to keep up with the continually changing applications and hardware interfaces. The paper discusses a very efficient, cost-effective and flexible alternative to solving the above issues, with the use of proxy-based services. These services can be used to improve the functionality and performance, regardless of the underlying network. They can be applied to the existing network infrastructure, to improve the quality and reliability of the existing services.