Time-Aware Publish/Subscribe for Networks of Mobile Devices

TL;DR

Thyme is a novel time-aware publish/subscribe system designed for mobile device networks, enabling effective data dissemination by incorporating temporal dimensions into subscriptions and publications, thus addressing current infrastructure limitations.

Contribution

The paper introduces Thyme, a new extended topic-based publish/subscribe system that incorporates time as a fundamental dimension for mobile edge networks.

Findings

Thyme effectively supports time-based subscriptions including past, present, and future data.

Simulation results demonstrate Thyme's suitability for mobile edge scenarios.

Thyme enhances data dissemination by leveraging persistent storage for temporal subscriptions.

Abstract

Smart mobile devices are increasingly ubiquitous and are the primary source of user-generated content, and current communication infrastructures are failing in keeping up with the rising demand for the avid sharing of such content. To alleviate this problem and fully harness the amount of resources currently available at the network edge, mobile edge paradigms started to emerge. Though, application developers still struggle to tap that potential at the edge due to the lack of adequate communication and interaction abstractions. Thus, we propose a high-level abstraction that can be easily exploited by developers to design mobile edge applications focused on data dissemination. In this paper, we propose Thyme, a novel extended topic-based, time-aware publish/subscribe system for networks of mobile devices. In Thyme, time is a rst order dimension. Each subscription has an associated time frame, starting and ending either in the future, present, or past. Making the past available requires both subscriptions and publications to be persistently stored. We present the design of Thyme and evaluate it using simulation, discussing and characterizing the scenarios best suited for its use.