Mutually Exclusive Data Dissemination in the Mobile Publish/Subscribe System

The topic-based mobile publish/subscribe (pub/sub) system has shown the potential applications in many scenarios, e.g., product coupon distribution. In this paper, we focus on the budget-constrained data dissemination services with a pre-determinated total amount of copy. A mobile user may subscribe data under different topics, but receiving a copy in any topic is enough. This is the mutually exclusive delivery requirement in many scenarios. In light of the different amounts of data and the different popularity levels of data in each topic, deciding which data should be forwarded to mobile users becomes an important problem. This paper aims to design an efficient data dissemination scheme in the aforementioned scenario, which minimizes the maximum dissemination delay, and incurs small communication overhead at the same time. We start with the offline message dissemination problem, and the corresponding optimal solution is proposed. Later, we consider the online situation, and propose a distributed data forwarding algorithm, which considers both the amount of data in different topics, mobile users' subscription, and their data forwarding abilities, respectively. The real trace driven experiments show that the proposed scheme achieves a good performance.