Mobility in Publish/Subscribe Systems
Publish/Subscribe interaction model provides a data-centric network abstraction for developing distributed applications. By allowing applications to specify data that they are interested in receiving by name, rather then by explicit network location, makes application independent of the underlying network transport. This makes writing distributed application much easier and simpler, since the applications do not need to know explicitly about network reconfiguration. In other words, publish/subscribe paradigm allows creation of application-level network virtualization.
Research goals of this project is to study the role of publish/subscribe communication model in the emerging networking architectures. We concentrate on three areas:
- MAN/WAN. Emerging applications that need to support mobile users in the infrastructure-oriented networks (such as WANs and MANs). In this category are distributed application and services for supporting mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDA, notebooks.
- Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. These are infrastructureless environments where the network is formed spontaneously. Every node that participates is mobile, so these kinds of networks experience high number of reconfigurations due to physical mobility of the nodes, which make MANETs particularly challenging environment for application development.
- Body area networks. With the availability of physically small computers that can be wirelessly networked and cheaply manufactured, it is becoming possible to embed networks of these tiny devices on a person. The main application areas for body area networks are health care, high performance athlete monitoring, entertainment (video game with physical interfaces), and fitness.
For MAN/WAN networks, we have proposed several protocols that allow any existing distributed pub/sub system to efficiently deal with mobile users. We have also examined the effects of routing computations on performance of distributed pub/sub systems. Routing computations are operations of matching, covering, insertion and intersection for publications, subscriptions and advertisements commonly found in distributed pub/sub systems. For MANETs, we have developed and evaluated a reliable and fault tolerant distributed pub/sub system. This was the first reliable content-based routing solution for ad hoc networks. We think that content-based routing is particularly well suited for this kind of environment as it allows applications to be isolated from network effects.
We use NS2 network simulator as the platform to evaluate the mobility protocols.
Publications
- Muthusamy, V., Petrovic, M., Jacobsen, H.-A.,
Effects of Routing Computations in Content-Based Routing Networks with Mobile Data Sources. In Proceedings of 11th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM). August 2005.
- Petrovic, M., Muthusamy, V., Jacobsen, H.-A.,
Content-Based Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. In Proceedings of 2nd International
Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (Mobiquitous). July 2005.
- Muthusamy, V., Petrovic, M., Gao, D., Jacobsen, H.-A., Publisher Mobility in Distributed Publish/Subscribe Systems. In Proceedings of International Workshop on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS). June 2005.
- Burcea, I., Jacobsen, H-A., de Lara, E., Muthusamy, V., Petrovic, M. Disconnected Operation in Publish/Subscribe Middleware. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM). January 2004.