Abstract

In data-centric networking, data sinks declaratively express information needs, while data sources simply publish information of
interest. This paradigm greatly simplifies large-scale distributed application development and eases continued system evolution. The challenge, however, lies in the development of middleware abstractions
that support this modus operandi. We argue that publish/subscribe realized as adaptive content-based message routing over general
overlay topologies is ideally suited as middleware abstraction for data-centric networking.

In this talk we illustrate the vision of data-centric networking realized through publish/subscribe messaging. We contribute
content-based routing protocols to support general overlay topologies, as opposed to traditional tree-based or flooding-based schemes. Among
other benefits, our approach enables message routes to adapt to dynamic conditions, such as congestion, failure, or network status and
traffic, by choosing among alternate routing paths. We also discuss how to exploit this flexibility for the detection of composite
events. This research draws from the open source PADRES publish/subscribe project applied in industry collaborations to
business activity monitoring, business process management, monitoring and control of service-level agreements, and enterprise application
integration.

More information about PADRES is available from:

  http://padres.msrg.org

Speaker bio:

Hans-Arno Jacobsen is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He holds the Bell University Laboratories Chair in Software and he is the
chair of the Computer Engineering Group. His research is focused on the activities of the Middleware Systems Research Group (msrg.org).

His research aims to ease the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed enterprise applications. In pursuit of these
objectives, he engages in basic research on event processing, publish/subscribe, service-orientation, aspect-orientation, and green
middleware. In research and development engagements with various companies, he pursues projects on business process management, service
delivery models, service and infrastructure management, and e-energy.

Selected research projects include the PADRES Events & Services Bus (padres.msrg.org) for effective business process management, the
eQoSystem project (eQoSystem.msrg.org) for declarative monitoring and control of SLAs (service level agreements) in enterprise applications
and business artifacts, and the AspeCtC (ACC) project (aspeCtC.net) for increasing modularity in systems software and embedded systems.

Arno has served as program committee member of various international conferences, including ICDCS, ICDE, Middleware, SIGMOD, OOPSLA and
VLDB. He was the Program Chair of the 5th International Middleware Conference and the General Chair of the Inaugural International
Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems 2007. He is among the initiators of the DEBS (debs.org) conference series and the
Event-based.org (event-based.org) research portal. Further information is available from msrg.org.