Aspect-oriented space containers for efficient publish/subscribe scenarios in intelligent transportation systems

Abstract

The publish/subscribe paradigm is a common concept for delivering events from information producers to consumers in a decoupled manner. Some approaches allow the transportation of events even to mobile subscribers in a dynamic network infrastructure. Additionally, durable subscriptions are guaranteed exactly-once message delivery, despite periods of disconnection from the system. However, in some application areas, like in the safety-critical telematics, durable delivery of events is not sufficient enough. Short network connectivity time and small bandwidth limit the number and size of events to be transmitted hence relevant information needed for safety-critical decision making may not be timely delivered. In this paper we propose the integration of publish/ subscribe systems and Aspect-oriented Space Containers (ASC) distributed via Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) in the network. The approach allows storage, manipulation, pre-processing, and prioritization of messages sent to mobile peers during bursts of connectivity. The benefits of the proposed approach are a) less complex application logic due to the processing capabilities of Space Containers, and b) increased efficiency due to delivery of essential messages only aggregated and processed while mobile peers are not connected. We describe the architecture of the proposed approach, explain its benefits by means of an industry use case, and show preliminary evaluation results. © Springer-Verlag 2009.