Software architecture for decentralised distribution services in spontaneous networks

Factors that drive the design of distributed systems are experiencing a phase of rapid changes. Mobility and the new methods of interconnectivity brought along with it have to be faced by the fundamentals of distributed systems. Simultaneously, hardware tasks are being adopted by software, making it possible to make those system elements configurable that have traditionally been considered static. Spontaneous changes in configurations, connections, and physical environment are common factors that are increasingly brought along with the distributed systems design. This thesis considers an architecture for a software framework that faces those challenges by providing interconnectivity for distributed pieces of software in a new way. The original idea presented here is to create middleware services that arise in a distributed and spontaneous manner from the interconnections of the interconnected, distributed pieces of software themselves. The complete independence of any centralised middleware service producer is the key issue in the proposed solution. Other issues are the means of communication over different media and the ability to assure the robustness of the provided services despite changes in the configuration or the presence of different software elements. The solution has been presented in the form of the software architecture of a proposed design. A major part of the introduced solutions has been validated by distinct cases related to both industry and research