Why We Shouldn't Forget Multicast in Name-oriented Publish/Subscribe

TL;DR

This paper advocates for incorporating multicast into name-oriented publish/subscribe systems to enhance real-time data distribution, support many-to-many communication, and simplify content updates, demonstrated through a middleware implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a group-oriented naming concept and a multicast access approach, filling a gap in current unicast-focused publish/subscribe architectures.

Findings

Multicast integration improves real-time data distribution.

Group-oriented naming supports various group schemes.

Middleware implementation demonstrates feasibility.

Abstract

Name-oriented networks introduce the vision of an information-centric, secure, globally available publish-subscribe infrastructure. Current approaches concentrate on unicast-based pull mechanisms and thereby fall short in automatically updating content at receivers. In this paper, we argue that an inclusion of multicast will grant additional benefits to the network layer, namely efficient distribution of real-time data, a many-to-many communication model, and simplified rendezvous processes. These aspects are comprehensively reflected by a group-oriented naming concept that integrates the various available group schemes and introduces new use cases. A first draft of this name-oriented multicast access has been implemented in the HAMcast middleware.