The publish-subscribe communication paradigm is enjoying increasing popularity thanks to its ability to simplify the development of complex distributed applications. However, many existing solutions in the publish-subscribe domain address only part of the challenges associated with the design of applications for dynamic scenarios such as mobile ad hoc or peer-to-peer networks. This talk presents my work aimed at addressing these limitations with novel protocols that allow publish-subscribe middleware to support unexpected disconnections, mobility, and context-aware interactions. I start by introducing the publish-subscribe model and presenting a general-purpose reactive solution that addresses dynamicity through the reconfiguration of the event dispatching infrastructure. I then complete the picture by presenting a context-aware extension to the model and by describing a geocast-based protocol that exploits context information to control the dissemination of events in a mobile ad hoc network.

Biographical Note: David Frey received his Laurea Degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2002. In May 2006, he received his PhD in Computer Engineering also from Politecnico di Milano. He then spent a year as a visiting researcher in the Mobile Computing Laboratory at Washington University in St Louis, MO, USA. His main research interests are in the design and analysis of distributed protocols for dynamic network scenarios such as large-scale peer-to-peer systems and mobile ad hoc networks.