Astrolabe is a service that
continuously monitors resources in the Internet, and allows clients to locate resources
using this information. Astrolabe maintains a tree-based representation of all the
collected resource information. The leaves in the tree contain directly measured
resource information, while internal nodes are generated using condensation
functions that aggregate information in child nodes. Such information may be
used for cluster management, application-level routing and placement of servers and
pervasive computing. The nodes are automatically replicated, updates being
propagated using a novel hierarchical gossip protocol.
Updates propagate quickly in spite of scale, failed nodes, and message loss.
Astrolabe is secured using Public Key Certificates without compromising its
scalability.
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