EAGER: State Replication Amongst Communicating Parties

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

This project will explore a new approach for digital communication on the Internet. Contemporary systems, including all Internet-connected devices and infrastructure, use an approach modeled on the early telephone system; the telephone system sent signals between two endpoints which share a single channel—the telephone “line”. This model is a transmit-receive model whereby a person places a call and transmits her message to another person who receives the call. This model forms the basis for the Internet Protocol (IP) that is in use on the Internet today. There is another approach called a request-response model used on the Internet whereby a user makes a request (for example asking for what is showing at the local theater) and a response with that information is returned to the requester. This project, however, takes a different stance based on “state synchronization.” Consider two examples of modern communication that are not well-served by the existing models. When editing collaborative documents, it is natural that the users want to access and modify the same document, even when they each have their own copy. Likewise, in multi-player games, each player wants to observe and manipulate the same shared virtual environment, even though the players are hosting their own copy locally. We observe that most applications, such as collaborative document editing, messaging apps, file backups, social media apps, and multiplayer games, as well as cloud services, are naturally expressed in this model. Our vision is to demonstrate that applications and systems that use a synchronization model that keeps shared information in sync, are significantly simpler, more efficient, and more trustworthy. This research will elaborate the fundamentals of the synchronization model of communication and will explore its relation to the transmit-receive and request-response models used in contemporary Internet protocols. This work pursues a new model because problems and challenges in today’s networked systems, such as infrastructure complexity, security and privacy, centralization of service providers, and application complexity, are likely properties of the underlying communication models rather than protocol implementation details. The synchronization model is inspired by the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, in which state changes made in one location are reflected in another. To express communication in this model, applications are concerned with the structure of the state they share with others, and how they make, detect, and react to state changes. This project will elaborate and formalize the semantics of the proposed model and will develop an analytical framework to enable comparison between the three models discussed. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.