Decentralized Naming in Distributed Computer Systems
Abstract
Designing a global character-string naming facility is an important and difficult problem in distributed systems. Providing global names-names that have the same meaning on any participating machine-is a vital step in welding a collection of individual computers into a single, coherent system. But the nature of large distributed systems makes it difficult to implement global naming with acceptable efficiency, fault tolerance, and security: network communication is costly, system components can fail independently, and parts of the system may belong to many autonomous and mutually-suspicious groups. Existing name service designs do not solve the problem in full; even the best current designs do not have the efficiency or capacity to name every object in a large system-they generally name only hosts or mailboxes, not files. This thesis introduces a new paradigm for name service called decentralized naming. Directories at different levels of the global naming hierarchy are implemented using different techniques. The uppermost (global) levels employs conventional distributed name serves for scalability, while at lower (regional and local) levels, naming is handled directly by the managers of the named objects. The name mapping protocol uses multicast for fault tolerance and a specialized caching technique for efficiency. A capability system provides security against counterfeit replies to name lookup requests.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADA198671
Entities
People
- Timothy P. Mann
Organizations
- Stanford University