Usage of Telegram Bots for message exchange in distributed computing

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the scheme of unidirectional and bidirectional messaging built over the popular Telegram service. The main purpose of our approach is to provide free real-time message exchange solution for inter-node communications in browser-based volunteer grid computing. Telegram Bot API provides reliable serverless implementation of messaging infrastructure, with support of browser JavaScript clients. The key feature of proposed scheme is that no application server is needed at all, so the solution is suitable for decentralized distributed algorithms, where interacting nodes (both compute and control) run in browser sessions. Bot is a special account managed by a user program that is designed to receive messages, analyze them and generate new messages. Despite the Telegram documentation statement that bots (as automatically running self-controlled routines) are not allowed to exchange messages with each other, the actual data transfer between bot contexts can be implemented through Telegram channels. We propose application level peer-to-peer duplex communications, along with simplex data channels for unidirectional messages dispatched from initiative sources to known remote processors, or “data sinks”.