Alternative Systems and Models

Chair: Ted Herman

Program Committee Members

This corner of SSS 2009 invites contributions that do not fit into established areas mentioned by the other tracks. Particularly, emerging topics motivated by technology trends can be open to preliminary considerations of safety, security, and self-stabilization. While some of these topics connect to engineering advances, others are motivated by new applications and use-cases for distributed systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
  • Stream Computing: the continued uptake of large scale, data-centric applications encourages stream-oriented handling of data in a distributed system/source context. Here, consequences of safety and self-stabilization should be investigated.
  • Power-Aware Protocols and Algorithms: recently, power awareness and control has become a critical problem for many types of systems. Research is needed to see how the constraints and analysis of power-awareness impact safety, security, and self-stabilization.
  • Asynchronous and Event-Driven Interfaces: the tracks on embedded systems, multicore computing, mobility and dynamic networks, need not concentrate on general questions of robust application interfaces of the type that programmers and system engineers would use to build safe, secure and self-stabilizing systems. Papers submitted on this topic will investigate the requirements and patterns of software interfaces.
  • Heuristic Stabilization: the topic of optimization in graph theory is frequently studied in self-stabilization, and numerous studies apply heuristics to obtain approximation bounds on the quality of the solution. Heuristics for rate selection, population control, and other quantities of interest in modern distributed systems have not been studied well in the context of self-stabilization, and submissions on these aspects would be welcome.