Supporting mobility in content-based publish/subscribe middleware

  • Authors:

  • Ludger Fiege;Felix C. Gärtner;Oliver Kasten;Andreas Zeidler

  • Affiliations:

  • Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD), Darmstadt, Germany;Distributed Programming Laboratory, Lausanne, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Zurich, Switzerland;Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD), Darmstadt, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 2003 International Conference on Middleware
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) is considered a valuable middleware architecture that proliferates loose coupling and leverages reconfigurability and evolution. Up to now, existing pub/sub middleware was optimized for static systems where users as well as the underlying system structure were rather fixed. We study the question whether existing pub/sub middleware can be extended to support mobile and location-dependent applications. We first analyze the requirements of such applications and distinguish two orthogonal forms of mobility: the system-centric physical mobility and an application-centric logical mobility (where users are aware that they are changing location). We introduce location-dependent subscriptions as a suitable means to exploit the power of the event-based paradigm in mobile applications. Briefly spoken, location-dependency refines a subscription to accept only events related to a mobile user's current location. Implementations for both forms of mobility are presented within the content-based pub/sub middleware Rebeca, drawing from its refined routing capabilities (namely, covering and merging).