Evaluating publish/subscribe approaches for use in tactical broadband networks

The publish/subscribe messaging pattern is particularly useful in limited resource networks due to it offering asynchronous messaging. It also requires fewer messages to be sent over the network than what is the case for the request/response messaging pattern. NATO has identified the WS-Notification standard as the publish/subscribe pattern to use for Web services, but other standards, such as the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and MQTT are gaining momentum as alternatives to WS-Notification. In this paper we investigate the performance of these three protocols in resource constrained networks in order to determine if using one or more of these is a viable alternative to resorting to proprietary or special purpose protocols that are designed for one specific networking scenario.