Extending mobility to publish/subscribe systems using a pro-active caching approach

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Gaddah, Abdulbaset | Kunz, Thomas

Affiliations: Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Note: [] Corresponding author: Thomas Kunz, Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6. Tel.: +1 613 520 3573; Fax: +1 613 520 5727; E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: The publish/subscribe communication paradigm has many characteristics that lend themselves well to mobile wireless networks. Our research investigates the extension of current publish/subscribe systems to support subscriber mobility in such networks. We present a novel mobility management scheme based on a pro-active caching approach to overcome the challenges and the performance concerns of disconnected operations in publish/subscribe systems. We discuss the mechanism of our proposed scheme and present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of our approach and alternative state-of-the-art solutions based on reactive approaches and durable subscriptions. The obtained results illustrate significant performance benefits of our proposed scheme across a range of scenarios. We conclude our work by discussing a modeling approach that can be used to extrapolate the performance of our approach in a near-size environment (in terms of broker network and/or subscriber population) to our experimental testbed.

Keywords: Message-oriented middleware, publish/subscribe paradigm, mobility management, mobile computing, wireless networks

DOI: 10.3233/MIS-2010-0105

Journal: Mobile Information Systems, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 293-324, 2010