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

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.