On the modelling of publish/subscribe communication systems

This paper presents a formal framework of a distributed computation based on a publish/subscribe system. The framework abstracts the system through two delays, namely, the subscription/unsubscription delay and the diffusion delay. This abstraction allows one to model concurrent execution of publication and subscription operations without waiting for the stability of the system state and to define a Liveness property which gives the conditions for the presence of a notification event in the global history of the system. This formal framework allows us to analytically define a measure of the effectiveness of a publish/subscribe system, which reflects the percentage of notifications guaranteed by the system to subscribers. A simulation study confirms the validity of the analytical measurements. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.