Astrolabe maintains a tree-based representation of all the collected resource information. The leaves in the tree contain directly measured resource information, while internal nodes are generated using condensation functions that aggregate information in child nodes. Such information may be used for cluster management, application-level routing and placement of servers and pervasive computing. The nodes are automatically replicated, updates being propagated using a novel hierarchical gossip protocol.
Updates propagate quickly in spite of scale, failed nodes, and message loss.
Astrolabe is secured using Public Key Certificates without compromising its scalability.