Mobility support through caching in content-based publish/subscribe networks

In a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) network, message delivery is guaranteed for all connected subscribers at publish time. However, in a dynamic mobile scenario where users join and leave the network, it is important that content published at the time they are disconnected is still delivered when they reconnect from a different point. In this paper, we enhance the caching mechanisms in pub/sub networks to enable client mobility. We build our mobility support with minor changes in the caching scheme while preserving the main principles of loose coupled and asynchronous communication of the pub/sub communication model. We also present a new proactive mechanism to reduce the overhead of duplicate responses. The evaluation of our proposed scheme is performed via simulations and testbed measurements. © 2010 IEEE