| Abstract: | This paper deals with the problems associated with developing a name management system which will be an integral part of a special type of distributed system, an internet system. An internet system is a software system that provides transparent access to resources and services distributed over a collection of single-site computing systems and local area networks. The responsibilities of an internet name management system (INMS) are to (1) provide the name service that locates named resources and binds resources to locations within the internet and (2) manage the naming information. This work investigates a distributed approach for maintaining the naming information. Various design issues and possible solutions are discussed. In particular, this paper examines several significant factors, including the design of the global name table, the effects of internet communications, name data locality, and the maintenance of replicated name data, and discusses the effects they may have on the performance of internet naming operations. Empirical data collected from an experiment involving a prototype INMS implementation are presented and then used to analyze the effects of the above design factors. |
