On the Benefit of Network Coding for Timely and Reliable Event Dissemination in WAN

Many interoperable software systems atop of large-scale critical infrastructures are based on the publish/subscribe paradigm. They are developed using data dissemination middleware services, which are required to provide reliability and timeliness in multicast communications. The literature of event dissemination and the market of publish/subscribe middleware technologies are rich of solutions, however, they hardly achieve the goal of providing fault-tolerance without violating the timeliness requirements. In this paper we present an analysis of the related work on this topic and propose an approach for combining two different approaches, namely coding and gossiping, able to satisfy timeliness and reliability requirements, respectively. We evaluate the potential benefit of coding on the information delivery performance, even when the sender introduces a redundancy to improve reliability.