A web based Publish-Subscribe framework for mobile computing

The growing popularity of mobile devices is permanently changing the Internet user’s computing experience. Smartphones and tablets begin to replace the desktop as the primary means of interacting with various information technology and web resources. While mobile devices facilitate in consuming web resources in the form of web services, the growing demand for consuming services on mobile device is introducing a complex ecosystem in the mobile environment. This research addresses the communication challenges involved in mobile distributed networks and proposes an event-driven communication approach for information dissemination. This research investigates different communication techniques such as polling, long-polling and server-side push as client-server interaction mechanisms and the latest web technologies standard WebSocket, as communication protocol within a Publish/Subscribe paradigm. Finally, this paper introduces and evaluates the proposed framework, that is a hybrid approach of WebSocket and event-based publish/subscribe for operating in mobile environments. Keywords—mobile computing; Websockets; publish-subscribe;