ISL Architecture: Network-Centric Interoperability Solution

Applications including legacy stove-piped systems and software agents can (1) describe their needs, capabilities and interfaces to other agents and legacy systems; (2) find and interact with other applications to accomplish complex tasks in flexible federation, versus a single monolithic application; (3) interact with humans and other agents to accept tasking and present results, and (4) adapt to changes in the environment and the task at hand.

Architecture:

ISL is a distributed service oriented architecture that solves the challenge of integrating and managing highly distributed and/or fluid applications that extend to small footprint devices running at the network edge. It provides:

  • Eclipse plug-in for the development of loosely coupled services
  • Rapid incorporation of legacy systems
  • Dynamic registration and discovery
  • Persistence for intermittent connectivity inherent in pervasive networks
  • Flexible run-time communications; transport & wire protocol independence
  • Distributed transaction support
  • Dynamically deployable behavior
  • Distributed security framework
  • Massive scalability
  • Interoperability with existing middleware

ISL provides access to shared protocols and ontologies, mechanisms for describing agents' capabilities and needs, and services that support interoperability among agents and legacy systems at flexible levels of semantics—all distributed across a network infrastructure.

ISL is not intended to replace current architectures but rather to complement their capabilities with services supporting trans-architecture systems. Agent technologies support semantically rich conversations among these agents (and wrapped legacy systems and services), which allow them to interoperate outside their local "community." An analogue is the Internet's bridging of heterogeneous networks by gateways and protocols. Programmers will make their components "ISL aware," much as many network applications are now made "Internet ready" or "Web ready" by supporting protocols and languages such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, and XML. Furthermore, programmers will want to make their components "ISL aware" to enable them to participate in dynamic teams that leverage other components discovered at runtime.

ISL leverages other technologies supporting component interconnectivity and interoperability among objects and other components (e.g., OMG's CORBA, Sun's Jini, Web Services, JXTA).

ISL includes a method-based application programming interface to services. All communication is peer-to-peer. For this reason, it scales to a large number of agents with no restrictions beyond those imposed by network bandwidth. Agent registration and discovery, on the other hand, are reliant on one or more lookup services.

Formal experiments by the Navy and GITI have demonstrated that as the number of agents increases, there is no degradation in performance. The experiments used up to 10,000 agents.
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