On Context-Aware Publish-Subscribe

Complex communication patterns often need to take into account the characteristics of the environment, or the situation, in which the information to be communicated is produced or consumed. Publish-subscribe, and particularly its content-based incarnation, is often used to convey this information by encoding the “context ” of the publisher into the published messages, taking advantage of the expressiveness of content-based addressing to encode context-aware communication patterns. In this paper we claim that this approach is both inadequate and inefficient and propose a context-aware publish-subscribe model of communication as a better alternative. In particular, we describe the API of a new publish-subscribe model that is both content and context-based, and we explore possible routing schemas to implement this new model in a distributed publish-subscribe system potentially improving traditional content-based routing.