Salamander: A Push-Based Distribution Substrate for Internet Applications

The Salamander distribution system is a wide-area network data dissemination substrate that has been used daily for over a year by several groupware and webcasting Internet applications. Specifically, Salamander is designed to support push-based applications and provides a variety of delivery semantics. These semantics range from basic data delivery, used by the Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis (IPMA) project, to collaborative group communication used by the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC) project. The Salamander substrate is designed to accommodate the large variation in Internet connectivity and client resources through the use of application-specific plug-in modules. These modules provide a means for placing application code throughout the distribution network, thereby allowing the application to respond to network and processor resource constraints near their bottlenecks. The delivery substrate can be tailored by an application for use with a heterogeneous set of clients. For example the IPMA and UARC projects send and receive data from: Java applets and applications; Perl, C and C++ applications; and Unix and Windows 95/NT clients. This paper illustrates the architecture and design of the Salamander system driven by the needs of its set of current applications. The main architectural features described include: the data distribution mechanism, persistent data queries, negotiated push-technology, resource announcement and discovery, and support for Application-level Quality of Service policies.