[10-10]Netquest, a declarative approach for networking

Date:2008-10-06

Title：Netquest, a declarative approach for networking
Speaker：Prof. Stephane Grumbach

    Director of LIAMA, the Sino-French IT Lab in Beijing
    http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~grumbach/

Time：3:00pm, Friday, Oct. 10
Venue：Lecture room, Lab for Computer Science, Level 3 Building #5

Abstract:
Handling networks is one of the major challenges of IT with an increasing number of applications which have to cope with the limitations, the dynamics or the heterogeneity of networks, while providing a seamless behavior.

Currently, programming applications over networks is a very tedious task, involving complex issues at low levels. It would be fantastic if it was possible to write distributed applications in a declarative manner, by specifying only what is desired, and not how it is obtained, much like writing queries over relational databases.

Providing such programming abstraction is the objective of the Netquest system. Nodes in networks are seen as cells in living organisms. There are a lot of different cells/nodes with different types of interactions/networks, but all share the same information, the DNA/declarative programs.

I will first present theoretical results on the distributed complexity of the evaluation of logical expressions over graphs, in languages such as First-Order, Fixpoint or Monadic Second Order Logic. They are of interest for declarative networking protocols.

I will then describe the Netquest system which consists of a DBMS together with a distributed query engine and a hybrid router which handles the communication. We consider networks, were all nodes, equipped with the netquest system, exchange data and queries, expressed in Netlog, an extension of Datalog well suited to express networking protocols as well as distributed applications. I will show how classical protocols can be defined and executed efficiently, and also how new adaptive protocols can be obtained.