A Transport Protocol for Best-Effort Content-Based Networks

You are cordially invited to attend the PhD Dissertation Defense of Amirhossein MALEKPOUR on Wednesday, November 7th 2012 at 15h30 in room SI-008 (Informatics building)
 
Abstract:
Content-based publish/subscribe networking is a relatively new communication paradigm compared to IP networking, with a different approach to addressing network hosts.  In content-based networking addressing as well as information dissemination center around information and interests. A host's address is represented by its interest and information is routed by a network of brokers to hosts with relevant interests. We advocate the idea that content-based networking should be implemented and offered as a basic network service and be accessible everywhere and to all applications.

In this dissertation, we propose an end-to-end "transport protocol" that improves three key properties of best-effort content-based systems namely, message ordering, reliability, and congestion control. These essential requirements have been previously addressed at the protocol and broker-level, at the cost of much higher complexity and lower messaging efficiency. On the contrary, our guiding principle in designing this transport protocol is to view the underlying best-effort publish/subscribe network as a black box and only assume that it provides a general publish/subscribe API.
The experimental results are encouraging and confirm our fundamental hypothesis that the basic service provided by best-effort content-based networks can be significantly improved in terms of key quality measures, using an end-to-end transport protocol.

Dissertation Committee:

• Prof. Fernando Pedone, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Research Advisor)
• Prof. Antonio Carzaniga, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Research Advisor)
• Prof. Matthias Hauswirth, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Internal Member)
• Prof. Mehdi Jazayeri, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Internal Member)
• Prof. Peter Triantafillou, University of Patras, Greece (External Member)
• Prof. Benoît Garbinato, University of Lausanne, Switzerland (External Member)
• Prof. Bettina Kemme, McGill University, Canada (External Member)