Spines is a generic messaging infrastructure that provides transparent unicast and multicast communication over dynamic, multi-hop networking environments, providing automatic reconfiguration and network topology flexibility. It is useful for deploying overlay networks in the Internet, to achieve additional services not available in the current networking infrastructure (e.g. overlay multicast), as well as improved performance for existing services. It creates generic network topologies with dynamic link characteristics (bandwidth, latency, loss rate, and burstiness) on regular computer clusters. It creates a logical LAN over unorganized, multi-hop wireless and hybrid networks.
