12,490 research outputs found
Reliable and timely event notification for publish/subscribe services over the internet
The publish/subscribe paradigm is gaining attention for the development of several applications in wide area networks (WANs) due to its intrinsic time, space, and synchronization decoupling properties that meet the scalability and asynchrony requirements of those applications. However, while the communication in a WAN may be affected by the unpredictable behavior of the network, with messages that can be dropped or delayed, existing publish/subscribe solutions pay just a little attention to addressing these issues. On the contrary, applications such as business intelligence, critical infrastructures, and financial services require delivery guarantees with strict temporal deadlines. In this paper, we propose a framework that enforces both reliability and timeliness for publish/subscribe services over WAN. Specifically, we combine two different approaches: gossiping, to retrieve missing packets in case of incomplete information, and network coding, to reduce the number of retransmissions and, consequently, the latency. We provide an analytical model that describes the information recovery capabilities of our algorithm and a simulation-based study, taking into account a real workload from the Air Traffic Control domain, which evidences how the proposed solution is able to ensure reliable event notification over a WAN within a reasonable bounded time window. © 2013 IEEE
Vitis: A Gossip-based Hybrid Overlay for Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe
Peer-to-peer overlay networks are attractive solutions for building Internet-scale publish/subscribe systems. However, scalability comes with a cost: a message published on a certain topic often needs to traverse a large number of uninterested (unsubscribed) nodes before reaching all its
subscribers. This might sharply increase resource consumption for such relay nodes (in terms of bandwidth transmission cost, CPU, etc) and could ultimately lead to rapid deterioration of the system’s performance once the relay nodes start dropping the messages or choose to permanently abandon the system. In this paper, we introduce Vitis, a gossip-based publish/subscribe system that significantly decreases the number of relay messages, and scales to an unbounded number of nodes and topics. This is achieved by the novel approach of enabling rendezvous routing on unstructured overlays. We construct a hybrid system by injecting structure into an otherwise unstructured network. The resulting structure resembles a navigable small-world network, which spans along clusters of nodes that have similar subscriptions. The properties of such an overlay make it an ideal platform for efficient data dissemination in large-scale systems. We perform extensive simulations and evaluate Vitis by comparing its performance against two base-line publish/subscribe systems: one that is oblivious to node subscriptions, and another that exploits the subscription similarities. Our measurements show that Vitis significantly outperforms the base-line solutions on various subscription and churn scenarios, from both synthetic models and real-world traces
Reliable Messaging to Millions of Users with MigratoryData
Web-based notification services are used by a large range of businesses to
selectively distribute live updates to customers, following the
publish/subscribe (pub/sub) model. Typical deployments can involve millions of
subscribers expecting ordering and delivery guarantees together with low
latencies. Notification services must be vertically and horizontally scalable,
and adopt replication to provide a reliable service. We report our experience
building and operating MigratoryData, a highly-scalable notification service.
We discuss the typical requirements of MigratoryData customers, and describe
the architecture and design of the service, focusing on scalability and fault
tolerance. Our evaluation demonstrates the ability of MigratoryData to handle
millions of concurrent connections and support a reliable notification service
despite server failures and network disconnections
Time to publication for NIHR HTA programme-funded research: a cohort study
ObjectiveTo assess the time to publication of primary research and evidence syntheses funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme published as a monograph in Health Technology Assessment and as a journal article in the wider biomedical literature.Study designRetrospective cohort study.SettingPrimary research and evidence synthesis projects funded by the HTA Programme were included in the cohort if they were registered in the NIHR research programmes database and was planned to submit the draft final report for publication in Health Technology Assessment on or before 9 December 2011.Main outcome measuresThe median time to publication and publication at 30?months in Health Technology Assessment and in an external journal were determined by searching the NIHR research programmes database and HTA Programme website.ResultsOf 458 included projects, 184 (40.2%) were primary research projects and 274 (59.8%) were evidence syntheses. A total of 155 primary research projects had a completion date; the median time to publication was 23?months (26.5 and 35.5?months to publish a monograph and to publish in an external journal, respectively) and 69% were published within 30?months. The median time to publication of HTA-funded trials (n=126) was 24?months and 67.5% were published within 30?months. Among the evidence syntheses with a protocol online date (n=223), the median time to publication was 25.5?months (28?months to publication as a monograph), but only 44.4% of evidence synthesis projects were published in an external journal. 65% of evidence synthesis studies had been published within 30.0?months.ConclusionsResearch funded by the HTA Programme publishes promptly. The importance of Health Technology Assessment was highlighted as the median time to publication was 9?months shorter for a monograph than an external journal article
Oral evidence
Oral evidence given to the House of Commons BIS Select Committee Inquiry into Open Access
Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types in Dynamic Environments
Over the years, mobile devices have become increasingly popular and gained improved
computation capabilities allowing them to perform more complex tasks such as
collaborative applications. Given the weak characteristic properties of mobile networks,
which represent highly dynamic environments where users may experience regular involuntary
disconnection periods, the big question arises of how to maintain data consistency.
This issue is most pronounced in collaborative environments where multiple users interact
with each other, sharing a replicated state that may diverge due to concurrency
conflicts and loss of updates.
To maintain consistency, one of today’s best solutions is Conflict-Free Replicated Data
Types (CRDTs), which ensure low latency values and automatic conflict resolution, guaranteeing
eventual consistency of the shared data. However, a limitation often found on
CRDTs and the systems that employ them is the need for the knowledge of the replicas
whom the state changes must be disseminated to. This constitutes a problem since it is
inconceivable to maintain said knowledge in an environment where clients may leave
and join at any given time and consequently get disconnected due to mobile network
communications unreliability.
In this thesis, we present the study and extension of the CRDT concept to dynamic
environments by introducing the developed P/S-CRDTs model, where CRDTs are coupled
with the publisher/subscriber interaction scheme and additional mechanisms to
ensure users are able to cooperate and maintain consistency whilst accounting for the
consequent volatile behaviors of mobile networks. The experimental results show that
in volatile scenarios of disconnection, mobile users in collaborative activity maintain
consistency among themselves and when compared to other available CRDT models, the
P/S-CRDTs model is able to decouple the required knowledge of whom the updates must
be disseminated to, while ensuring appropriate network traffic values
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