Convergence evaluation of adaptation to losses: The case of subscription notification delivery to mobile users in smart spaces

Abstract

A smart space provides a shared view on information, which is cooperatively produced, processed, and consumed by participants themselves in a computing environment. One of the most advanced networked operations on this information is the subscription operation. It supports the information-driven programming style: a notification is delivered to all interested participants when an appropriate information fact is formed in the smart space. In this work, we continue our study of the notification delivery when the latter is subject to losses. Notifications assigned to the mobile user in smart space are undelivered though several information updates have been made by other participants. The notification delivery performance can be improved by using active control: The client of the mobile user side proactively tracks information updates according to individually defined time points. These points can be selected rationally to adapt the notification delivery to observed losses. We analytically and experimentally evaluate the convergence of two active control strategies with adaptation to losses for different loss distributions.