A Decentralized Web Service Infrastructure for the Interoperability of Applications in Multihop Dynamic Networks

The advent of mobile computing has changed the shape of distributed computing. Mobile devices now have enough computational capabilities to take part of distributed computations. Thanks to their wireless networking interfaces, they can have direct interactions with their peers, self-organize in dynamic multi-hop networks, like the Internet of Things (IoT), the Edge, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), etc. Such networks exhibit a number of inherent characteristics (mobility, unpredictability, scarce connections, etc) which make it difficult the use of their resources by (distributed) applications. Because existing middleware for distributed computing was most often designed to operate on clouds/grids/clusters, it can hardly be used in these networks. IDAWI belongs to a new class of middleware solutions which rely on decentralization to federate the resources of dynamic multi-hop networks, to the purpose of facilitating the design and implementation of distributed applications in networks of mobile devices. IDAWI goes further by proposing a collective stream-oriented computing model that matches the very nature of such networks. This permitted us to design, implement and describe in this article the architecture of a specific decentralized Web backend exposing as a whole the resources of a dynamic multi-hop network as a set of Web services. In order to profit from the stream-oriented and collective natures of IDAWI 's computation model, these Web services make a clever use of several standard Web technologies they rely on. All the concepts presented in this paper can be found in an Open Source reference implementation.