A Solution

Experts all over the world are beginning to agree that a fundamental reform of the Internet’s paradigms and core technologies is needed to cope with the challenges of the new millennium. The publish/subscribe paradigm (pub/sub) has been proposed as a remedy to the problems facing the current Internet

In pub/sub networking, senders “publish” what they want to send and receivers “subscribe” to the publications that they want to receive. In principle, no one receives any material to which they have not explicitly expressed an interest by way of subscription.  The result is a powerful yet flexible infrastructure with a high degree of resiliency.

One can observe that a large share of the Internet’s usage is already essentially pub/sub in nature:

• Dissemination of software updates

• Delivery of breaking news announcements

• General media broadcasting (e.g. audio/video)

• Periodic and aperiodic messaging

…and many more!

In addition, contemporary areas of research like sensor networks and context awareness rely on pub/sub communications to provide services to end users.

It seems promising to derive a new Internet architecture based on the pub/sub paradigm, leading to a redesign of all Internet communication layers. In such a new Internet, multicast and caching will be the norm and security and mobility will be designed into the architecture, rather than added as after-thoughts. An example of pub/sub interaction is shown in the figure below.

Example of pub/sub interaction