🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the complexity, routing ambiguity, and unreliable shutdown commonly introduced by ad hoc glue code in existing modular distributed systems. To overcome these issues, the paper proposes CNS—a lightweight, local-first hybrid event bus that seamlessly bridges local and distributed publish-subscribe contexts through a unified event model and consistent routing semantics. CNS employs an asynchronous fire-and-forget primary path while supporting request-response extensions on the same topic. It integrates typed event keys, family-based serialization and validation, and NATS-backed distributed transport. Prototype evaluation demonstrates low-latency performance: approximately 30 microseconds for local delivery, 1.26–1.37 milliseconds for purely distributed communication, and 1.64–1.89 milliseconds for hybrid bridging, with validation overhead remaining manageable—making CNS suitable for structured inter-process communication and efficient messaging among resource-constrained nodes.
📝 Abstract
Modular software deployed on mini compute units in controlled distributed environments often needs two messaging paths: low-overhead in-process coordination and selective cross-node distribution. In practice, event identity, serialization, and transport bridging are frequently implemented as ad hoc glue, which complicates inter-process communication (IPC), structured routing, and shutdown behavior. This paper presents CNS, a lightweight local-first hybrid event fabric centered on asynchronous fire-and-forget messaging. CNS combines a typed event key, per-family serialization and validation, a local publish/subscribe context for in-process coordination, and a NATS-backed distributed context for inter-node distribution. A bridge runtime moves events between the two contexts while preserving a common routing vocabulary. The primary operating model is fire-and-forget publication and subscription; bidirectional request-reply remains available as a secondary extension on the same subject space. A Python prototype and single-machine measurements are reported. Local-only delivery averaged about 30 $μ$s. Distributed-only delivery averaged 1.26-1.37 ms, and the hybrid bridge averaged 1.64-1.89 ms. Validation introduced modest overhead relative to serialization choice. The resulting artifact is suited to structured IPC and practical message movement within modular services and across bounded sets of controlled nodes.