Lightweight and Dynamic Messaging System

Supervisor: Dr Eliane Bodanese

Research group(s): Networks

With the massive growth of the Internet and advances of its applications, many enterprise systems are becoming systems of systems (SoS), as a collection of subsystems distributed over geographically different areas. Financial services, telecommunication applications, transportation and health-care systems can generate a complex set of producers and consumers of information. Another example of the increasing scale of producers and consumers of information is the Internet of Things (IoT), that will be applied to a variety of domains raging from the home (i.e., smart homes), whole countries (i.e., smart grid) to worldwide (i.e., environmental monitoring). Therefore, a very large scale of devices producing/consuming data can be forecasted. In both SoS and IoT become very complex for producers to control all unit demands of information. So information aggregators play a key role to alleviate the high information demand. A publish/subscribe based messaging/content framework is very suitable in providing these services, however effective routing and resilience of delivery are of extreme importance to guarantee correct and efficient delivery of information. This project proposes a light content driven routing for message/content delivery systems, which can allow profile generation, policy compliance and replacement ability in emergency and warning scenarios. The project will investigate a lightweight description and matching techniques for routing and delivery, but the major innovation will be that the middleware complexity and behaviour of description changes with the environment and communication current context, allowing new advertisements from the ground to be incorporated and to change the content of the messaging system. This is a novel approach for use in overlay/domain networks and for the IoT data aggregation and delivery. The student will extensively review currently proposed solutions in the literature and research feasible modifications leading to a novel proposal(s) for the scenarios envisaged. IBM is interested in this type of research and the supervisor will propose an internship for the student. Depending of the policies proposed in the research, BT may also be interested. The prospect supervisor recently had one PhD student in an internship in BT.