A control and communication infrastructure (CCI) for use in a wide area network wherein a plurality of interconnected machines operate a plurality of different applications having varying data transport requirements. Machines within a wide area distributed network agree on a namespace of data objects so that all machines use the same name for a particular data object. Then, machines communicate with one another by publishing and subscribing to data objects in the namespace. The infrastructure selects an optimal transport mechanism from a set of available transport mechanisms based on the data being moved and its frequency and loss tolerance, and then hides the details of how the data is moved from the application using the infrastructure.