Supporting disconnectedness - transparent information delivery for mobile and invisible computing

As computing devices become ubiquitous and increasingly mobile, it is becoming apparent that the directed peer-to-peer communication model has shortcomings for many forms of distributed interprocess communication. Undirected communication, including content-based messaging, is becoming increasingly common. The paper examines the issues involved in supporting content based messaging to both mobile devices and users using a combination of connected and mobile (possibly disconnected) devices. These issues include persistence, multi-client shared subscriptions, non-destructive notification receipt, and notification expiry. The discussion is placed in the context of the development of a proxy-server to provide disconnectedness support for the Elvin content-based messaging service.