Garbage collection in regions

Abstract

The concept of regions provides for the ability to group and scope services across a network. Issues arise when entities of a region are no longer part of the region, due to a request to leave the region, an eviction by the region, or even component or network failures. Consequently, the references to these entities must be garbage collected. Depending on the purpose and design constraints of the region at hand, there can be many ways this can be implemented. Therefore, application designers must have the flexibility to implement a region design to incorporate a garbage collection scheme that meets their needs for correct semantics as well as performance and resource requirements. We have formulated a design for the region infrastructure that allows this flexibility and looked at various implementations of region designs built on top of this infrastructure. These proof-of-concept implementations allowed us to investigate some of the issues that arise regarding garbage collection.