groupcomm

Group communication.
Leitão J, Marques J, Pereira JO, Rodrigues L.  2012.  X-BOT: A Protocol for Resilient Optimization of Unstructured Overlay Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 23(11):1. Abstract

Gossip, or epidemic, protocols have emerged as a highly scalable and resilient approach to implement several application level services such as reliable multicast, data aggregation, publish-subscribe, among others. All these protocols organize nodes in an unstructured random overlay network. In many cases, it is interesting to bias the random overlay in order to optimize some efficiency criteria, for instance, to reduce the stretch of the overlay routing. In this paper we propose X-BOT, a new protocol that allows to bias the topology of an unstructured gossip overlay network. X-BOT is completely decentralized and, unlike previous approaches, preserves several key properties of the original (non-biased) overlay (most notably, the node degree and consequently, the overlay connectivity). Experimental results show that X-BOT can generate more efficient overlays than previous approaches.

Oliveira JP, Pereira JO.  2013.  Experience with a Middleware Infrastructure for Service Oriented Financial Applications. 28th ACM Symposium on Applied computing (SAC) - Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems. Abstractop13.pdf

Financial institutions, acting as financial intermediaries, need to handle numerous information sources and feed them to multiple processing, storage, and display services. This requires filtering and routing, but these feeds are usually provided in custom formats and protocols that are not the best fit for further processing. Moreover, the sheer volume of information and stringent timeliness and reliability requirements make this a substantial task.
In this paper,
i)
we characterize one of these information feeds (the Exchange Data Publisher feed from the NYSE Euronext European Cash Markets) and
ii)
we present and evaluate a dissemination system for this particular feeder based on commodity hardware and open-source message-oriented middleware (Apache Qpid). This allows us to assess the feasibility of this approach and to point out the main challenges to be overcome.