1. Research Issues in Middleware (Bhaskar)
Overlay networks for
Distributed events
Service discovery in the wide-area
Service composition
Possibly,
Hierarchical overlay networks
Overlay networks with clusters as nodes
To what size can a resilient overlay network scale? RON (MIT) talks about ~50 nodes. This may not be enough for many purposes (e.g., service composition). Can backup-path algorithms be scaled for 100s of nodes? 1000s of nodes? What is the trade-off between latency to recovery and scale of the overlay network?
Can a connection-oriented overlay network with route-pinned paths have better latency to recovery than a connection-less overlay network?

2. Research Issues in Middleware (Bhaskar)
Placement of overlay nodes: how can knowledge about the structure of the Internet be used for better resilience?
The Internet today mostly has TCP traffic. Most failure, wide-area latency models that exist today are developed in this context. How do things change if there is more streaming video traffic? Does congestion behavior change?
CDNs  Distributed preference registry
Can the CDN model be extended to managing user preferences for 3G devices?
Mostly read-only, slow changes
How to move preferences to follow the user?