Self-maintained distributed data structures for field-based coordination in dynamic networks

Field-based coordination is a promising approach to orchestrating the activities of components in a widerange of application scenarios. To implement such an approach, one can rely on distributed tuples injected into a network and then propagated to form field-like distributed data structures to be sensed by application components. Moreover, to gain the full benefits from such an approach, it is important to enable the distributed tuples to preserve their structures despite the dynamics of the network. In this paper, we show how a variety of self-maintained distributed tuples for field-based coordination can be easily programmed in the Tuples On The Air (TOTA) middleware. Several examples clarify the approach, and a case study is detailed throughout the paper to ground the discussion. Eventually, performance data are presented to verify the effectiveness of the approach. Copyright