Loosely-coupled distributed reactive programming in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Pervasive applications running on mobile ad hoc networks have to be conceived as loosely-coupled event-driven architectures because of the dynamic nature of both the underlying network and the applications running on top of them. Such architectures can become tedious to develop and understand when the number of events and event handlers increases. The reason is that the control flow of the application is driven by event handlers or callbacks which are triggered independently and are scattered throughout the application code. In this paper, we propose a number of language constructs that reconcile the elegant processing of events of a reactive programming system with the loose coupling of a publish/subscribe system that is required to cope with the dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.