The publish/subscribe communication paradigm is an appealing alternative to the traditional request/reply sibling for all those applications where many-to-many data diffusion is heavily used. Currently I'm investigating if and how the OMG's DDS (Data Distribution Service) specification can be implemented in large-scale settings.

Distributed applications faced in the last decade an enormous growth tanks to the introduction of the peer-to-peer interaction model. These applications are based on an infrastructure (overlay network) whose main purpose is to maintain a logical network connecting all the users. In this research area my interests were mainly focused on the study of deterministic algorithms to maintain connectivity of a overlay network topologies, and, more specifically, on the impact of churn (the continuous addition/removal of users to the system) on these algorithms.

Clock Synchronization is a basic building block for many distributed applications. As such, the topic has been widely studied for many years, and several algorithms exist which address different scales, ranging from LAN to WAN but a new class of applications is emerging, operating in very challenging settings, for which clock synchronization is far from being solved. These applications are required to operate without any assumption on deployed functionalities, preexisting infrastructure, or centralized control, while being able to tolerate dynamism and scaling from few hundred to ten of thousands of nodes. Currently I'm working to define a novel algorithm to obtain Clock Synchronization in a fully decentralized paradigm.