Group Orchestration in a Mobile Environment

The increasing popularity of mobile devices fosters the omnipresence of services in mobile environments. Software systems in a mobile environment often want to manage a set of services that form a logical group and orchestrate the execution of a particular process for all its members. To orchestrate a group of services, abstractions are required which allow control over the execution in a way that transcends the individual process of a single member. Currently, existing languages do not offer adequate abstractions to perform said group orchestration in a reliable way. In this paper we present high-level abstractions for group orchestration as a new set of workflow patterns. We show how these patterns are integrated in an existing workflow language for nomadic networks, i.e. NOW. The workflow language NOW handles network and service failures at the core of the language. By extending this fault tolerance to the new group abstractions, we show how to conduct these in a reliable way.