Virtual Brokers for Large-Scale Publish/Subscribe in Wireless Sensor Networks

Brokers are critical elements for many publish and subscribe (pub/sub) systems. They are dedicated devices with large computation and storage capacities, but they could suffer from scalability problems when comes to actual large-scale implementations in wireless sensor networks. Inspired by the recent virtual MIMO concept for wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes the idea of ‘virtual brokers’ for large-scale pub/sub systems in sensor networks, and presents in detail the design of a three-stage algorithm for forming a virtual broker around multiple co-located sensor nodes using only network connectivity information. Using computer modeling, we conduct an investigation of our virtual broker formation algorithm and preliminary results demonstrate the potential of our algorithm for scalable formation of virtual brokers.