A Language for Modeling Network Availability

Computer networks have become ubiquitous in our society and thus, the various types of resources hosted by them are becoming increasingly important. In this paper we study the resource availability in networks by defining a dedicated middleware language. This language is a conservative extension of the action system formalism, a general state-based approach to modeling and analyzing distributed systems. Our language formally treats aspects such as replicated and homonym resources, their mobility, as well as node failure and maintenance in networks. The middleware approach motivates the separation of the views and formalisms used by the various user types such as the network user, the application developer, and the network manager.