Performance of publish/subscribe middleware in mobile wireless networks

Abstract

Publish/subscribe middlewares are becoming popular for distributed applications because of their flexible and scalable nature. Anonymous and loosely-coupled communication between publisher and subscriber, along with the inherently asynchronous nature of these systems, help them adapt quickly to changing environments, making them a good choice for mobile cellular networks. This paper studies publish/subscribe middleware performance in such networks in detail. As a first step, the paper characterizes a popular implementation of publish/subscribe system for the mobile domain, studying and analyzing the effect of different mobility parameters, which to the best of our knowledge is the first experimental research on the performance behavior of publish/subscribe systems in a mobile wireless domain. As a second step the paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of middleware level handoffs, a well known solution to extend publish/subscribe systems to a mobile domain, and identifies the performance concerns of such extensions. The results show that such handoff protocols involving two brokers are impractical from a performance perspective under highly dynamic and unreliable mobile wireless settings. The paper identifies the basic reason for the limitations of middleware level handoffs.

Engineering mobile wireless publish/subscribe systems for high performance

“…The results also show that the system give poor performance in low bandwidth environments. The results are discussed in detail in [8].…”

“…In the absence of any support service, durable subscriptions face additional challenges in mobile environments such as message loss and duplicate delivery of messages [8]. Moreover, in a highly mobile environment, each broker would end up having a large number of inactive subscribers that may never reconnect to that broker, imposing on the broker a substantial overhead and making its performance increasingly worse to the point of saturation.…”

“…Moreover, in a highly mobile environment, each broker would end up having a large number of inactive subscribers that may never reconnect to that broker, imposing on the broker a substantial overhead and making its performance increasingly worse to the point of saturation. Several techniques can be considered to extend durable subscriptions to the mobile domain [8] out of which middleware level handoff seems to be the most natural. We implemented a prototype of middleware level handoffs and our results [8] show that durable subscriptions with middleware level handoffs perform poorly in mobile cellular networks where disconnections are frequent compared to fixed networks where interruptions in communications are rare.…”

“…Several techniques can be considered to extend durable subscriptions to the mobile domain [8] out of which middleware level handoff seems to be the most natural. We implemented a prototype of middleware level handoffs and our results [8] show that durable subscriptions with middleware level handoffs perform poorly in mobile cellular networks where disconnections are frequent compared to fixed networks where interruptions in communications are rare. A set of representative results are shown in Figure 4.…”

“…In an earlier paper [8], we have characterized a popular implementation of JMS for mobile wireless settings, studying and analyzing the effect of different mobility parameters, which to the best of our knowledge is the first experimental investigation of the performance of publish/ subscribe systems in a mobile wireless domain. In that paper, we have also designed and evaluated middleware level handoffs, a well known solution to extend publish/subscribe systems to a mobile domain, and have identified the performance concerns of such solutions.…”