Publish/Subscribe Versus a Content-Based Approach for Information Dissemination

NATO has identified the WS-Notification standard from OASIS to support event-driven communication in the NATO enterprise and when building coalition networks. Using this standard promotes interoperability. However, there is significant overhead associated with WS-Notification since it is built on SOAP Web services (WS). Overhead can be problematic in networks with scarce resources. In this paper we perform a small-scale comparative evaluation of overhead of WS-Notification with another publish/subscribe standard: Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). We also measure how these standards compare to the novel approach of content-based networking under the same networking conditions. We use the Named Data Networking (NDN) flavor of content-based networking for our experiment. Though fundamentally different, these approaches can be used to realize the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. The drawback of standard publish/subscribe approaches is that they usually rely on a broker, which constitutes a single point of failure. NDN, on the other hand, has no broker which makes it interesting to consider for tactical networks. We use NATO Friendly Force Information (NFFI), which is much used for friendly force tracking, as the data format for the payload in all our tests. In the paper we focus on the respective approaches' network resource consumption. Based on the results we argue that the content-based approach seems promising and should be investigated further.