Article in Proceedings INPROC-2007-51

BibliographyHerrmann, Klaus: Self-Organizing Replica Placement - A Case Study on Emergence.
In: Proceedings of the first IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
pp. 13-22, english.
IEEE Computer Society Press, July 2007.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CR-SchemaC.2.4 (Distributed Systems)
H (Information Systems)
Keywordsself-organization, emergence, replica placement, case study
Abstract

The concept of self-organization is rapidly gaining importance in the area of distributed computing systems. However, we still lack the necessary means for engineering such system in a standardized way since their common properties are rather abstract, and the mechanisms from which self-organization emerges are too diverse. Therefore, it has become common practice to engineer computing systems by taking inspirations from well-known case studies of biological systems. However, the concepts found in such systems are in many cases only partially transferable to the domain of distributed computing systems since biological systems are subject to vastly different constraints compared to those in a computing system. Our contributions in this paper are the following: (i) We present a case study of a self-organizing software system that originates from the domain of distributed computing systems. Therefore, its concepts can be exploited in other distributed computing systems much more directly. (ii) We give a detailed analysis of the emergent properties of the system and the mechanisms by which they arise. (iii) We generalize the mechanisms by which self-organization emerges in this system and present a catalog of design questions that may help engineers in creating arbitrary self-organizing systems.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Distributed Systems
Entry dateOctober 24, 2007
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