Preserving global consistency for dynamic reconfiguration

This paper focuses on global consistency preservation for dynamic reconfiguration. Global consistency requires no application computation be interrupted in reconfiguration. Among the existing methods for global consistency preservation, version management is of the most advantages. But the version-management transparency and old-version-removal problems have not been well solved. In this paper, a novel component model is proposed. Based on the model, an application is represented as a data flow diagram; application computations are represented as designed routes. Data visibility control and flow trace are implemented to solve the above two problems. Data visibility control is used to hide the version management mechanism from the component developers; flow trace is used to determine when the old components should be removed. Experimental results have demonstrated the advantages of the version management method and the effectiveness of the data visibility control and flow trace mechanisms.