Timeliness Evaluation of Intermittent Mobile Connectivity over Pub/Sub Systems

Abstract

Systems deployed in mobile environments are typically characterized by intermittent connectivity and asynchronous sending/reception of data. To create effective mobile systems for such environments, it is essential to guarantee acceptable levels of timeliness between sending and receiving mobile users. In order to provide QoS guarantees in different application scenarios and contexts, it is necessary to model the system performance by incorporating the intermittent connectivity. Queueing Network Models (QNMs) offer a simple modeling environment, which can be used to represent various application scenarios, and provide accurate analytical solutions for performance metrics, such as system response time. In this paper, we provide an analytical solution regarding the end-to-end response time between users sending and receiving data by modeling the intermittent connectivity of mobile users with QNMs. We utilize the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) middleware as the underlying communication infrastructure for the mobile users. To represent the user’s connections/disconnections, we model and solve analytically an ON/OFF queueing system by applying a mean value approach. Finally, we validate our model using simulations with real-world workload traces. The deviations between the performance results foreseen by the analytical model and the ones provided by the simulator are shown to be less than 5% for a variety of scenarios.