MHH: A Novel Protocol for Mobility Management in Publish/Subscribe Systems

Mobility management is an important issue for publish/subscribe systems to support mobile clients. The objectives of mobility management for publish / subscribe are to achieve short handoff delay and low message overhead, while at the same time guaranteeing reliable message delivery. Although mobility management has been extensively studied, the indirect communication style of publish/subscribe systems brings new challenges in designing mobility management solutions. In this paper, we propose a reliable and high-performance mobility management protocol, called multi-hop handoff (MHH) protocol, which sufficiently meets the requirements of publish/subscribe systems. A prototype was implemented for the MHH protocol and experiments were performed to compare the performance of MHH with two representative existing protocols. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency improvement made by the proposed MHH protocol over the existing protocols.