Virtualizing Communication for Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems

Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) form a broad class of highly distributed systems comprising a number of heterogeneous human-based and machine-based computing (service) units. These units collaborate in ad-hoc formed, dynamically-adaptive collectives. The flexibility of these collectives makes them suitable for processing elaborate tasks, but at the same time, building a system to support diverse communication types in such collectives is challenging. In this paper, we address the fundamental communication challenges for HDA-CAS. We present the design of a middleware for virtualizing communication within and among collectives of diverse types of service units. The middleware is able to handle numerous, intermittently available, human and software-based service units, and manages the notion of collectivity transparently to the programmer. A prototype implementation for validation purpose is also provided.