eProsima is pleased to announce the ongoing work on the AML Integrating Platform (AML-IP) under the scope of the ALMA project.

The AML Integrating Platform (AML-IP) is a communications framework in charge of data exchange between AML nodes through local or remote networks. It is designed to allow non-experts users to create and manage a cluster of AML nodes  to exploit the distributed and concurrent learning capabilities of AML. Thus, AML-IP is a communication framework that makes the transport protocols abstracted from the user, creating a platform that communicates each node without requiring the user to be concerned about communication issues. It also allows the creation of complex distributed networks with one or multiple users working on the same problem.

AML-IP implements its communications according to the DDS (Data Distribution Service) Specification. Specifically, it relies on the eProsima Fast DDS, a C++ implementation of the DDS standard, a protocol defined by the Object Management Group (OMG), which enables real-time communications between AML nodes deployed within the AML-IP framework. The eProsima Fast DDS library provides both an Application Programming Interface (API) and a communication protocol that deploys a Data-Centric Publisher-Subscriber (DCPS) model, with the purpose of establishing efficient and reliable information distribution among Real-Time Systems. eProsima Fast DDS is predictable, scalable, flexible, and efficient in resource handling. It also implements the TCP transport protocol for data transmission between DDS entities in Wide Area Networks (WANs).

The AML-IP architecture is designed focused on scalability, maintainability, independence and widely usable. The AML environment consists of nodes of different kinds that must communicate with one another. According to the current design, these nodes are classified into four categories.

• Algebraic Node: representing the instances of the AML. It is where the AML algorithm and all the data it requires will be executed.
• Agent Node: the main transport component, it manages the connection between the local cluster and external nodes across the Internet.
• Discovery Node: distributed along the network and accessible through the internet, manages the WAN discovery process.
• Routing Node: responsible for routing DDS traffic between several AML nodes deployed in different local networks that are isolated and inaccessible from the Internet.

AML-IP could operate on Local Area Networks (LAN), where all the hosts are under the same gateway; or on Wide Area Networks (WAN), where nodes are distributed along the Internet. The discovery process and the data transfer depends on the network type. The nodes under the same LAN discover each other via multicast communication. The nodes that require interchange data with external clusters must deploy an AML-IP Discovery Node that interconnects different LANs. To manage the discovery and data communication an AML-IP Agent Node must be deployed in every LAN.

If we extend the previous architecture in which only a couple of AML nodes distributed in different LANs are involved to a more complex scenario, it is possible to achieve deployments similar to the following one. In this we have several clusters of AML nodes, deployed with the AML-IP supporting LAN and WAN communication.

By Raúl Sánchez-Mateos from eProsima

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