Network Systems Group Princeton University   Publication Info

Title

Sophia: An Information Plane for Networked Systems

Authors

Mike Wawrzoniak
Larry Peterson
Timothy Roscoe

Abstract

This paper motivates and describes an example network Information Plane, called Sophia, currently deployed on PlanetLab. Sophia is a distributed system that collects, stores, propagates, aggregates, and reacts to observations about the network's current conditions. Sophia's approach is novel: it can be viewed as a multi-user distributed expression evaluator in which sensors and actuators form the ground terms, and statements take on the complete expressiveness of a logic language like Prolog. This paper argues that this approach has several advantages in managing and controlling a complex, federated, and evolving network: (1) a declarative logic language provides a natural way to express the kinds of statements that are common to this application domain, through temporal and positional logic rules, facts and expressions; and (2) distributed evaluation of such logic expressions provides many opportunities for performance optimization yielding an efficient system.

Published
As

Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-II),
Cambridge, MA November 2003.

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