Design and evaluation of a support service for mobile, wireless publish/subscribe applications

Abstract

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a support service for mobile, wireless clients of a distributed publish/subscribe system. A distributed publish/subscribe system is a networked communication infrastructure where messages are published by senders and then delivered to the receivers whose subscriptions match the messages. Communication therefore does not involve the use of explicit addresses, but rather emerges from the dynamic arrangement of publishers and subscribers. Such a communication mechanism is an ideal platform for a variety of Internet applications, including multiparty messaging, personal information management, information sharing, online news distribution, service discovery, and electronic auctions. Our goal is to support such applications on mobile, wireless host devices in such a way that the applications can, if they chose, be oblivious to the mobility and intermittent connectivity of their hosts as they move from one publish/subscribe access point to another. In this paper, we describe a generic, value-added service that can be used in conjunction with publish/subscribe systems to achieve these goals. We detail the implementation of the service and present the results of our evaluation of the service in both wireline and emulated wireless environments.