The Role of Overlay Services In a Self-Managing Framework for Dynamic Virtual Organizations

We combine and extend recent results in autonomic computing and structured peer-to-peer to build an infrastructure for constructing and managing dynamic virtual organizations. The paper focuses on the middle layer of the proposed infrastructure, in-between the Niche overlay system on the bottom, and an architecture-based management system based on Jade on the top. The middle layer, the overlay services, are responsible for all sensing and actuation carried out by the VO management. We describe in detail the API of the resource and component overlay services both on the management node and the nodes hosting resources. We present a simple use case demonstrating resource discovery, initial deployment, self-configuration as a result of resource availability change, self-healing, self-tuning and self-protection. The advantages of the design are 1) the overlay services are in themselves self-managing, and sensor/actuation services they provide are robust, 2) management can be dealt with declaratively and at a high-level, and 3) the overlay services provide good scalability in dynamic VOs.