Toronto Networking Seminar 2006


Effects of Routing Computations
in Content-Based Networks Under Mobility

Vinod Muthusamy
Middleware Systems Research Group
University of Toronto 

Date:  February  10,  3pm
Location: BA1210 (Bahen Center)

Abstract

The decoupling of producers and consumers in time and space in the publish/subscribe paradigm lends itself well to the support of mobile users who roam about the environment and experience intermittent network connectivity.  However, there is little study into the performance of such systems, and no quantitative evaluation of the role of routing computations in this context. We illustrate that some traditional assumptions of publish/subscribe systems are invalid when clients exhibit network mobility, and that traditional protocols perform poorly in these scenarios.  For example, ignoring routing computation time paints a false picture of scalability when publishers are mobile.  Considering computation time causes the performance of traditional protocols to decrease by an order of magnitude or completely break down.  As well, with traditional protocols, network capacity must be doubled to handle the extra load introduced when just 10% of subscribers are mobile.  For both mobile publisher and subscriber cases, we identify the key factors that affect performance, and propose and evaluate optimizations that greatly diminish the adverse effects of mobility.

This research is part of the ToPSS Projects - the Toronto Publish/Subscribe System and is joint work with Milenko Petrovic and Hans-Arno Jacobsen.

Bio:

Vinod Muthusamy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Middleware Systems Research Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie in the field of distributed publish/subscribe systems. Past and ongoing research have studied publish/subscribe protocols in various environments including peer-to-peer overlay networks, cellular networks, and wireless ad-hoc networks. He is currently interested in Service Oriented Architectures and distributed business process execution.
Vinod received a B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2002, and an M.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2005.