Landmark-based service recovery for distributed pub/sub services on disaster management

A communication system that supports timely, scalable, and highly available information exchanges over a heterogeneous plug-and-play network systems is called an Open Information Gateway (OIGY). Our work focuses on design for disaster resiliency, i.e. means to provide an OIGY with capabilities to deliver critical messages to parties in a disaster management system even when the underlying physical network has sustained serious damages. This article first presents the design of such an information gateway in general. It then presents the design and implementation of a middleware layer service recovery mechanism, essential for the gateway to achieve the aforementioned objectives. The mechanism is called landmark-based service recovery mechanism. It aims at recovering real-time publishing and subscription services within a disaster affected region. The article describes its design, together with its performance, measured in terms of its transmission and recovery overheads as a function of the number of message brokers in the network.