Infopipes for composing distributed information flows
Rainer Koster, Andrew P. Black, Jie Huang, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu · 2001
Building applications that process information flows on existing middleware platforms is di#cult, because of the variety of QoS requirements, the need for application-specific protocols, and the poor match of the commonly used abstraction of remote invocations to streaming. We propose Infopipes as a high-level abstraction for building blocks that handle information flows. The ability to query individual Infopipe elements as well as composite Infopipes for properties of supported flows enables QoS-aware configuration. Similarly to local protocol frameworks Infopipes provide a flexible infrastructure for configuring communication services from modules, but unlike protocols the abstraction uniformly includes the entire pipeline from source to sink, possibly across process and node boundaries.