Finished BibTex on IRT publications page

Today I fixed up the BibTeX links on the IRT publications page. I also changed the links so they open in a new, smaller window (like a dialog.)

Papers related to communication/networking middleware: IEEE Network

Am on the trail of papers related to work on communications or networking middleware from a high-level perspective. Been reading IEEE Network publication online all day, and found some interesting issues as well as articles that may be quite relevant:

• (2008) Vol 22, Issue 4: Context aware networks, in mobile scenarios (whole issue)
  
• (2007) Vol 21, Issue 4: GE Network Systems Architecture (whole issue)
• (2006) Vol 20, Issue 4: VON: a scalable peer-to-peer network for virtual environments (this paper has analysis of other P2P-based NVE systems)
• (2006) Vol 20, Issue 3: A survey of transport protocols for wireless sensor networks
• (2004) Vol 18, Issue 1: GE Middleware technologies for future communication networks (whole issue, and is very good)

Among other things:

• Registered and uploading final version of paper for CCNC 2009 conference.
• Testing the new WORKIT box, which may be the final version of the box we will ship
  

Grid computing and P2P resource discovery

Excellent survey paper on various programming models in grid computing, which relates very closely to what I am looking into in finding programming models for the get/set and distributed network computing environment at large: "Grid Programming Models: Current Tools, Issues and Directions".

Another related work paper is "Peer-to-Peer Resource Discovery in Mobile Grids," which defines a P2P service discovery protocol/framework for mobile environments.

One other direction I am currently looking into is the relationship between grid computing, cloud computing and the mobile distributed computing I am working on...

Network programming: scalable web servers and Java NIO

While looking for network programming APIs for my candidacy, I came across two excellent papers/presentations which are not directly related to my topic, but I need to bookmark in any case...

The first one is Scalable Network Programming: Or: The Quest For A Good Web Server (That Survives Slashdot) by Felix von Leitner. It talks about the problems of building scalable web servers, from ground up, including looking at fork() code, the time involved, measurements, comparison with threads, etc. An excellent read for people who know scaling web applications is hard, but would like to know more of why from an "under the hood" approach.

The second one, Improving Java Network Programming, by Brian Runk, is a simple application-level presentation, but compares the java.net and java.nio packages and discusses practical issues that arise while programming large-scale enterprise systems like ones built at Morgan Stanley.

Sockets over HTTP: Comet and Orbited

After my talk on "Disruption Tolerant Applications in Opportunistic Networks" at the IRT meeting yesterday, I found some interesting info about sockets over HTTP using Javascript.

The Javascript implementation, called Orbited, claims to provide a TCP socket over a web browser. Sounds like a really interesting concept. A slightly outdated tutorial on writing an IRC client using Orbited.

This is related to a neologism called Comet, which is "a web application model in which a long-held HTTP request allows a web server to push data to a browser, without the browser explicitly requesting it." (quote from Wikipedia's entry on Comet.)