A Rendezvous Mobile Broker for Pub/Sub Networks

On the current Internet, Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) systems are gaining popularity as efficient, simple, and scalable communication mechanisms. Mobile Pub/Sub systems are the next step for distributed Pub/Sub networks. On the other hand, the constrained characteristics of mobile nodes can limit the subscription expressiveness of the content consumers, and the overlaying applications and services. This paper describes a mobile broker model, that we call Rendezvous Mobile Broker, for integrating mobile nodes as fully-functional brokers. RMBs can delegate Pub/Sub tasks to other brokers and extend the subscription expressiveness in runtime; so, this delegation improves the mobile Pub/Sub systems’ suitability for scenarios with multiple content types.. This paper also describes a subscription allocation algorithm for extending the amount of subscriptions the mobile broker supports, in the form of topic-based subscriptions. Finally, we describe a proof of concept and validate the algorithms using real devices.