An experience in evaluating publish/subscribe services in a wireless network

ABSTRACT

As wireless technology becomes more available, developers of distributed applications are becoming more interested in how that technology affects the performance of their systems. We have developed a distributed publish/subscribe communication service initially hosted on the standard IP-wired network infrastructure, but would now like to rehost that service onto a GPRS wireless network. This paper reports on our experience in attempting to evaluate the performance of the service using an available emulation environment. Our conclusion from our experience to date is that current tools do not model the wireless network at an appropriate level of abstraction. In particular, they do not allow us to study the integration of individual publish/subscribe service-layer elements with GPRS network-layer elements, nor do they allow us to study multiple GPRS clients interacting over the network. Instead we were limited to results related to the interaction between an individual GPRS client and the GPRS network modeled as a monolith.

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