Pusman: Publish-subscribe meddleware for ad hoc networks

Most existing message-oriented middleware for mobile networks rely on infrastructure or assume the existence of reliable and continuous connections among communicating entities. These schemes are also based on single network protocol layer solutions and do not take advantage of cross-layer optimizations. Publish/subscribe middleware has been widely used to provide asynchronous communication functionality in distributed applications. Due to node mobility and frequent node disconnections, asynchronous publish-subscribe message middleware is a suitable communication model for mobile ad hoc networking environments. In this paper, we propose Publish/Subscribe Middleware for Ad hoc Networks (PUSMAN). PUSMAN is based on the publishing and subscription of topics. The main features of PUSMAN are mobility awareness, network reconfiguration, and cross-layer interaction support. The performance of the middleware was evaluated using simulations to determine the packet delivery ratio and control traffic overhead. These metrics were investigated as a function of the speed of the mobile node, the percentage subscribers, and the message publishing rate. The simulation results indicated that the proposed middleware achieves a good packet delivery ratio and low overhead irrespective of increases in mobile speed, the percentage of subscribers or the number of publishers.