Towards Optimising the Data Flow in Distributed Applications

Networked applications continuously move towards servicebased and modular solutions. At the same time, web technologies, proven to be modular and distributed, are applied to these application areas. However, web technologies have to be adapted to the new characteristics of the involved systems – no explicit client and server roles, use of heterogeneous devices, or high frequency and low latency data communication. To this end, we present an approach for describing distributed applications in terms of graphs of communicating nodes. In particular, we develop a formal model for capturing the communication between nodes, by including dynamic and static data producing devices, data consuming client applications, as well as devices that can serve as data produces and consumers at the same time. In our model, we characterise nodes by their frequencies of data exchange. We complement our model with a decision algorithm for determining the pull/push communication direction to optimise the amount of redundantly transferred data (i.e., data that is pushed but cannot be processed or data that is pulled but is not yet updated). The presented work lays the foundation for creating distributed applications which can automatically optimise data exchange.