Using publish/subscribe for message routing in mobile environments

Abstract

Publish/subscribe is a mature communication paradigm to route and deliver events from publishers to interested subscribers. Initially conceived for large scale systems, e.g., the Internet, it has been used more recently in new scenarios, e.g., wireless sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), where mobility and dynamicity are the norm. The loose-coupling and asynchronicity of publish/subscribe makes it an interesting choice for IoT scenarios, i.e., each node in an IoT network can choose a different role depending on its location, capabilities, etc. This paper presents MFT-PubSub, a fully mobile and fault tolerant content-based publish/subscribe protocol. Our proposal is a purely reactive solution for mobility in a publish/subscribe system without any kind of limits on the mobility patterns of the nodes. A wireless ad hoc network is created without the need of any previous connections or knowledge on the nodes. Handling the mobility, be it physical or logical, of both clients and brokers. We prove the validity of our solution by experimentation, and compare it with AODV, a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networking. The simulations show an improvement on message delivery rate over previously used protocols.