A Uniform Publish-Subscribe Infrastructure for Communication in Wireless Mobile Environments

In near future the transportation sector will be communication enabled. Devices in vehicles will be able to communicate and thus make a new range of services possible. However, heterogeneous communication capabilities and vehicle mobility complicates the art of designing and implementing these new systems and therefore it is important to have communication middleware that hides the complexity of low level network programming and presents a clean and understandable abstraction over communication to the application programmer. It has previously been shown that the publish-subscribe messaging paradigm provides a good communication abstraction for wireless networks of mobile nodes. In this paper we present PSI, a uniform publish-subscribe based infrastructure, for communication in wireless mobile environments. In PSI the application is divided into software components that each handles a well defined part of the functionality and communicate with other components using the publish-subscribe paradigm. From a components perspective it makes no difference where the receivers of a message are located-in the same process, in another process on the same node, or in a process on a remote node. All communication is handled uniformly. By showing how the infrastructure is used in a concrete instance we argue that it meets the requirements for middleware stated above and provides a good programming model for distributed systems in mobile environments