Supporting end-to-end quality of service properties in OMG data distribution service publish/subscribe middleware over wide area networks

Assuring end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) in distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems is hard due to the heterogeneity and scale of communication networks, transient behavior, and the lack of mechanisms that holistically schedule different resources end-to-end. This paper makes two contributions to research focusing on overcoming these problems in the context of wide area network (WAN)-based DRE applications that use the OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) QoS-enabled publish/subscribe middleware. First, it provides an analytical approach to bound the delays incurred along the critical path in a typical DDS-based publish/subscribe stream, which helps ensure predictable end-to-end delays. Second, it presents the design and evaluation of a policy-driven framework called Velox. Velox combines multi-layer, standards-based technologies—including the OMG DDS and IP DiffServ—to support end-to-end QoS in heterogeneous networks and shield applications from the details of network QoS mechanisms by specifying per-flow QoS requirements. The results of empirical tests conducted using Velox show how combining DDS with DiffServ enhances the schedulability and predictability of DRE applications, improves data delivery over heterogeneous IP networks, and provides network-level differentiated performance.     

Covering-Based Routing Algorithms for Cyclic Content-Based P/S Overlays

Content-based routing (CBR) publish/subscribe (P/S) system is an important class of distributed systems. This system differs from classical paradigms as messages are routed based on their content rather than their destination address, so as to provide a fine-granularity event dissemination, and support more flexibility decoupling applications. Covering-based routing is a typical optimization method of CBR and has been widely used as a building block in many distributed P/S systems, for it maintains a compact routing table and reduces the costs of communications and matching computations. So far as we know, this optimization method can only be implemented on acyclic overlay network, but cannot be directly utilized on cyclic networks. As the CBR in cyclic systems becomes a new focus of research, developing covering-based protocols and algorithms for cyclic P/S system is becoming significantly important. This paper contributes the cyclic covering-based routing protocol with corresponding algorithms to support covering-based protocol in cyclic P/S system, and implements it in PADRES, a distributed event management infrastructure based on the publish/subscribe model.     

A scalable and self-adapting notification framework for healthcare information systems

There has been a great interest in publish/subscribe systems in recent years. This interest, coupled with the pervasiveness of light-weight electronic devices, such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants, has opened a new arena in publish/subscribe networks. Currently, many broker overlay networks are static and rarely change in structure. Often, a network overlay structure is predefined or manually modified. This paper presents a dynamic broker network for disseminating critical lab and patient information in a Healthcare information system. The reported work builds upon previous network optimization research on ad hoc publish/subscribe networks. The underlying framework utilizes user-defined cost functions to satisfy quality of service constraints. In essence, the broker network optimization problem is reduced to an incremental search problem to generate low cost network configurations. Certain reliability issues are also addressed by providing a scheduling algorithm to selectively retransmit information and handle broker connectivity failures.     

On reliability in publish/subscribe services

Modern large-scale mission-critical systems demand efficient and robust multi-point data dissemination infrastructures. Since such infrastructures have to exhibit good performance when scaling up the number of interacting entities and managing large amounts of data, publish/subscribe services represent a suitable middleware solution due to their decoupling properties. However, since data are conveyed by networks where failures may occur, and since nodes may present a faulty behavior, such services also have to adopt proper mechanisms to deal with several kinds of failures and to guarantee event dissemination despite their occurrence. Although significant efforts have been made on this topic, many issues are still open.This article covers an introduction to the principles of assuring event notification even in the presence of faults, and an analysis of relevant state-of-the-art by both surveying the academic literature over the period 2000–2011 on reliable publish/subscribe services and overviewing current marketed products. Then, it presents the main challenges that are still unresolved and are worth being addressed in future research efforts.     

支持移动推送的一种分层式体系结构

移动环境中依赖内容发送的信息服务越来越受到欢迎，本文探讨了有代表性的应用情况，分析了移动推送服务的特征并提出了一种体系结构，该体系结构基于发布／订阅方式，支持松散耦合实体之间的多对多交互。     

发布订阅系统在移动Ad Hoc网络中的三种路由算法

介绍了分布式发布/订阅系统的原型，为Ad Hoc网络中的发布/订阅系统设计了三种基于内容的路由算法，分别说明了它们的运行方式，并进行了仿真与比较。结果表明：基于内容的可靠容错路由算法能够100%保证信息的传输，有容错机制，可靠性较强，但出现了传输延迟；基于内容的路由算法的可靠性不强，适合有线网络中分布式发布订阅系统的信息传输，传输延迟小；基于内容的容错路由算法有容错机制，传输延迟小     

Pervaho: A specialized middleware for mobile context-aware applications

The concept of context-awareness offers a great potential for the future of mobile applications. In order to be developed in an optimal way, mobile context-aware applications need appropriate middleware services. This paper introduces Pervaho, an integrated middleware aimed specifically at supporting the development and testing of mobile context-aware applications. To illustrate the use of Pervaho, we walk through the development of a concrete mobile application and show how it can be built on top of Pervaho’s location-based publish/subscribe service. We also illustrate how a specialized mobility testing tool significantly simplifies the process of testing proximity-based semantics. We then present the implementation of Pervaho, which is based on a set of communication protocols geared at mesh networks. Finally, we provide a performance analysis of our implementation.     

基于移动代理和密钥共享的发布/订阅系统的研究与设计

发布/订阅系统中信息的安全传输一直被忽视,一些保密的重要消息可能由于在传输过程中被人窃取而使得订阅者受到一定的损失.针对该问题,提出了一种基于移动代理的发布/订阅系统,该系统在传统的基于内容的发布/订阅系统中引入移动代理技术,从而有效地提高了系统的灵活性和可扩展性,使用可验证密钥共享算法能够进一步保证秘密信息的安全传输.最后,通过对各方面的性能分析,结果表明,该系统具备较高的安全性和灵活性.     

一种信息共享的主动服务框架

信息共享服务是Internet核心功能之一。提出了一种基于Internet与下一代广播网相互融合的信息共享主动服务框架,探讨了网络层次模型、业务流生成及内容解析等核心技术。该系统立足于Internet信息资源,通过对信息合理的收集、组织与分发,结合统一内容定位和信息过滤技术,实现个性化、主动化的信息服务。最后讨论了基于Web服务的信息订阅/发布主动服务系统的实现模型与实现框架。     

Delay tolerant lazy release consistency for distributed shared memory in opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks (ONs) allow mobile wireless devices to interact with one another through a series of opportunistic contacts. While ONs exploit mobility of devices to route messages and distribute information, the intermittent connections among devices make many traditional computer collaboration paradigms, such as distributed shared memory (DSM), very difficult to realize. DSM systems, developed for traditional networks, rely on relatively stable, consistent connections among participating nodes to function properly.We propose a novel delay tolerant lazy release consistency (DTLRC) mechanism for implementing distributed shared memory in opportunistic networks. DTLRC permits mobile devices to remain independently productive while separated, and provides a mechanism for nodes to regain coherence of shared memory if and when they meet again. DTLRC allows applications to utilize the most coherent data available, even in the challenged environments typical to opportunistic networks. Simulations demonstrate that DTLRC is a viable concept for enhancing cooperation among mobile wireless devices in opportunistic networking environment.     

A scalable publish/subscribe system for large mobile ad hoc networks

Since nodes that compose mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) does not have any prior knowledge about other nodes in many cases, the publish/subscribe communication paradigm that has the decoupling and asynchrony properties can be useful to share information between nodes. Existing publish/subscribe services for MANETs can be categorized into document flooding (DF), destination-based routing (DBR), and content-based routing (CBR). Although those approaches may work well when the size of network is small, all of them suffer from the performance decline as the size of the network increases. In this paper, we compare those approaches, and then propose a scalable publish/subscribe communication scheme in large MANETs by combining DF and CBR hierarchically. Our approach is to cluster all nodes in networks and to exploit CBR and DF for the intra- and inter-cluster communication, respectively. By using this approach, we can effectively utilize benefits of both approaches. Then, we present performance evaluation results which validate our idea with respect to system performance and scalability.     

GoDisco++: A gossip algorithm for information dissemination in multi-dimensional community networks

In this paper we propose GoDisco++, a gossip based approach for information dissemination in online social community networks. GoDiscoo++ uses local information available to nodes—that is information associated with a node and its neighbors. The algorithm exploits multiple relations which may exist between nodes, and applies social principles and behavior inspired decentralized mechanisms for targeted dissemination. The dissemination process works with the dual aims of (i) maximizing the spread among relevant nodes (high recall) and (ii) minimizing spamming among non-relevant nodes (high precision). Such a designed dissemination scheme can have interesting applications like probabilistic publish/subscribe, decentralized recommendation and contextual advertisement systems, to name a few. We validate the proposed approach with simulation experiments performed using real and synthetic datasets.     

基于发布/订阅模型的异构网络数据交换方法

消息数据高效传输是混合式网络的一个研究重点. 发布/订阅模型实现了消息发布者和消息订阅者之间解耦的消息传递模式, 适用于混合网络之间的消息数据传输. 通过将发布/订阅模型应用于消息数据交换, 规范了消息数据的格式, 实现了对各类通信设备的灵活管理以及基于消息内容的动态数据路由; 并利用一种基于循环调度的动态负载均衡算法, 对低速率网络和高速率网络之间的性能进行合理调度, 提高了低速率网络的性能. 模拟实验结果表明, 在混合式网络中发布/订阅模型能实现可靠的消息数据交换, 在负载平衡算法下性能更好.     

A cloud middleware for assuring performance and high availability of soft real-time applications

Applications are increasingly being deployed in the cloud due to benefits stemming from economy of scale, scalability, flexibility and utility-based pricing model. Although most cloud-based applications have hitherto been enterprise-style, there is an emerging need for hosting real-time streaming applications in the cloud that demand both high availability and low latency. Contemporary cloud computing research has seldom focused on solutions that provide both high availability and real-time assurance to these applications in a way that also optimizes resource consumption in data centers, which is a key consideration for cloud providers. This paper makes three contributions to address this dual challenge. First, it describes an architecture for a fault-tolerant framework that can be used to automatically deploy replicas of virtual machines in data centers in a way that optimizes resources while assuring availability and responsiveness. Second, it describes the design of a pluggable framework within the fault-tolerant architecture that enables plugging in different placement algorithms for VM replica deployment. Third, it illustrates the design of a framework for real-time dissemination of resource utilization information using a real-time publish/subscribe framework, which is required by the replica selection and placement framework. Experimental results using a case study that involves a specific replica placement algorithm are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of our architecture.