On data dissemination for large-scale complex critical infrastructures

Middleware plays a key role for the achievement of the mission of future large scale complex critical infrastructures, envisioned as federations of several heterogeneous systems over Internet. However, available approaches for data dissemination result still inadequate, since they are unable to scale and to jointly assure given QoS properties. In addition, the best-effort delivery strategy of Internet and the occurrence of node failures further exacerbate the correct and timely delivery of data, if the middleware is not equipped with means for tolerating such failures. This paper presents a peer-to-peer approach for resilient and scalable data dissemination over large-scale complex critical infrastructures. The approach is based on the adoption of epidemic dissemination algorithms between peer groups, combined with the semi-active replication of group leaders to tolerate failures and assure the resilient delivery of data, despite the increasing scale and heterogeneity of the federated system. The effectiveness of the approach is shown by means of extensive simulation experiments, based on Stochastic Activity Networks. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.